Mature Stealing: Yeats and Heaney as Examples

Abstract

Twentieth-century poetics and criticism have been much concerned with the ideas of example and influence of earlier writers on later, from T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”(1921) to Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence (1973), and afterwards. This paper considers the example of Yeats for his successors, first briefly for Auden but then extensively for Seamus Heaney. It argues that, while the influence of Yeats has often been said to be negative, in fact he has been a constant presence in Heaney’s thinking on poetics (he wrote in 1978 a celebrated essay “Yeats as an Example?” questioning that influence). I argue, finally, that influence seems to be agreed to be good when it is a matter of “Art” rather than public circumstance: we find the phrase “an exemplary artist” many times in praise of writers in troubled political times who are felt—rightly or not—to be “above” political concerns. This is true of the evaluation of both Yeats and Heaney in relation to their times.