‘Against Your Better Judgment’

‘Against Your Better Judgment’ Robert Lowell wrote in 1975 that Seamus Heaney was “the best Irish poet since Yeats”—a claim that some thought hyperbolic, or at least premature. But now, on the arrival of The Poems of Seamus Heaney, Lowell’s view has become consensus. Heaney, who died in 2013 at age seventy-four, produced a breadth and quality of work rivaling that of the first Irish Nobel laureate. Just as Yeats explored the “terrible beauty” of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rebellion, Heaney weighed...