Most of the sixteen essays collected in this volume began life as papers delivered in July 2015 at a memorial conference dedicated to the influence of classical literature on Seamus Heaney's poetry. The first half of the collection treats Heaney's engagement with Greek authors, while the latter half turns towards Rome and Latin-language writers. The conference was held at the Ioannou Centre for Research in Classical & Byzantine Studies in Oxford, and the list of participants who contributed to this volume is a distinguished list indeed. Both the introduction co-authored by Harrison and Macintosh as well as the epilogue by L. Hardwick accomplish far more than introductions and epilogues traditionally do. The introduction provides a critical framework for the approaches to Heaney's poetry that follow, emphasising the poet's deeply held conviction that poetry provides a kind of ‘redress’ to the injustices of the society that engage the writer (p. 3). The epilogue offers up the helpful notion of ‘Heaney's Classical Ground’, which Hardwick defines as ‘a material and metaphoric field that includes diverse tones, textures, and places as well as being a site from which poets, readers, and critics can probe Heaney's explorations of personal and cultural memory’ (p. 263). Combine these two assessments, and a single question emerges that connects all the essays in this volume: how does Heaney read, translate and re-imagine classical literature as a redress to the specific struggles that engaged both his own personal growth and the fate of his country over a long and productive career?

The fact is that Heaney was a serious and lifelong student of classical literature, and this is sometimes forgotten, particularly among American readers, as for them Latin and Greek no longer have the prominence in secondary school curricula they once had. So it is worth noting that Heaney began studying Latin at St Columb's College in Derry, where he boarded from 1951 to 1957, and he continued his engagement with classical literature until the day he died. As his son, Michael, reported during his eulogy at his father's funeral on 2 September 2013, Heaney had texted his wife, Marie, just before he passed away, the Latin phrase noli timere (‘do not be afraid’). And three years after Heaney died, his translation of Virgil's Aeneid 6 appeared. From start to finish, in effect, Heaney was engaged in ways both colloquial and formal with classical literature.

Most readers of Heaney's verse will be familiar with his version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, which he titled The Cure at Troy, if only because American president-elect Joe Biden read the following lines from the play in a video that went viral just after his election:

The British press covered this as well. It was not the first time that Biden had relied on this famous and perhaps over-quoted passage, and it probably will not be the last; the lines live and breathe naturally in the public arena, avoiding partisanship, and working well for a number of causes and arguments.

But most readers will be unfamiliar with the challenges of staging the play, and so Eastman's contribution, ‘Ancient Greek Sailors with Twentieth-Century Metaphors (and Pan-Chronic Trousers)’, will be particularly helpful in this regard. In her essay she reveals that ‘Heaney's “version” was not, dramaturgically, just the original play rendered in new words; it in fact had a new dramaturgical construction which gave the actors a completely different relationship with the audience’ (p. 86). The clearest changes Heaney made to the work regarded the chorus, in some ways the vehicle for the most direct relationship the audience has with the play. The opening chorus is new as well as the chorus that Heaney inserted just before the arrival of Hercules. Without getting into the interpretative specifics of these passages, I would mention that Eastman calls our attention to Heaney's seminal essay, ‘Feeling into Words’, which he originally delivered to the Royal Society of Literature in 1974 and which was later collected in Preoccupations, a selection of his essays and addresses. In that essay Heaney writes that by the summer of 1969 in Belfast, when the Troubles erupted in violence again, ‘the problem of poetry moved from being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament’ (Heaney, Preoccupations [1980], p. 56). Eastman's point is that, aside from the play itself, the original and interpolated choral sections showed Heaney's attempt to find the symbols that would faithfully represent his predicament as he faced the struggles that engaged his country. Similarly, L. Pitman-Wallace, in ‘A Door into the Dark: Staging The Burial at Thebes’, reveals a very hands-on Heaney as she relays the detailed discussions she had with the poet regarding subjects ranging from his choice of metre to the connections he saw between Creon and George Bush.

Even at the granular level of staging the play, then, Heaney found in classical literature fundamental structures of feeling and character that were ‘adequate to [his] predicament’. Another question emerges, and it is a refinement of the first question: what was it about classical literature, specifically, once these fundamental structures had been found and once they seemed to serve admirably as a ‘redress’ of sorts, that attracted Heaney over a lifetime of writing and translating? What brought him back continually to the literature? This collection of essays provides a number of answers to this question, and I want to have a look at some of them to provide a better understanding of the ground covered by these deeply informed readers of Heaney's verse.

Aside from epic literature – more on that later –, when we think of classical writing, we often think of pastoral writing; it is one of the mainstays of Greek literature, and on the Roman side, Virgil's Eclogues draws the most attention. In ‘Heaney and Hesiod’, however, R. Fowler focuses on Heaney's logical and abiding connection with the Greek farmer-poet Hesiod, but she also rightly extends the genealogy through the ‘ruralism in English-language poetry: the vernacular poetics of Clare and Burns and the farming credentials of Patrick Kavanagh and Les Murray’ (p. 40). This particular strain of English writing, often called the anti-pastoral, aims to bring a measure of realism, and the political exigency that goes along with such realism, to the real life of a real Irishman on a real Irish farm. We often forget that Heaney, born in 1939, came of age when T.S. Eliot still held sway with much English writing, and digging potatoes would not have made Eliot's list of preferred subjects that were adequate to his high Anglican predicament. But to paraphrase one reviewer of Heaney's early verse, and which Heaney quotes in his essay, ‘Feeling into Words’, the poet was entirely comfortable and even took pleasure in bringing his ‘mud-caked fingers into Russell Square’ (Preoccupations, p. 43). The anti-pastoral, then, helps Heaney from the beginning to fashion his own poetry of resistance to the British models that he both loved and, at times, mistrusted.

In ‘An Irish Poet Mines the Classics’ M. McDonald takes a long and clarifying look at ‘Mycenae Lookout’, the five-part lyric that appeared in Spirit Level and was inspired by Aeschylus’ trilogy, the Oresteia. The poem, as McDonald reminds us, was written just after the IRA broke the ceasefire in 1994 and ‘after hope that the Troubles were over following the death of ten hunger strikers (1981), led by the courageous Bobby Sands’ (p. 135). Aeschylus’ trilogy involves a detailed narration of ambition, murder, revenge and justice, and McDonald's reading of Heaney's poem shows just how thoroughly the poet uses the classical setting to interact with the political landscape that confronts him as he surveys the present state of Ireland. Much of ‘the language and imagery of the poem’, she shows, ‘are from Northern Ireland’, and she even finds echoes of Abbie Hoffman's take on the Vietnam war and the impossibility of there being innocent bystanders to the slaughter (p. 136). Situating the poem squarely in its contemporary context, McDonald does an authoritative job of mapping Heaney's trek through the Oresteia and recording that journey for us, as he offers up the trilogy, revised and refreshed, for the contemporary reader. McDonald reveals that for Heaney classical literature serves as a field of artistic jurisprudence, where creativity and creative engagement with these plays amounts to a kind of public service, instructing us how to bring new perspectives to the old struggles that arc from Aeschylus and ancient Greece to Heaney and the Republic of Ireland. The plays serve Heaney as an artistic arena for moral arbitration, a place where stands can be taken, sentences reprieved, and the difficulties of living a fully human and responsible life showcased and examined.

But in many ways it was the Latin language that held Heaney enthralled even until his last text just before he died. And it is no surprise that from the Roman canon, Virgil's Aeneid, particularly Book 6, which recounts Aeneas’ trip to the underworld, would recur throughout his life in many ways until finally his own translation of that book appeared posthumously in 2016. R. Falconer's exhaustive contribution to our understanding of this lifelong engagement, ‘Heaney and Virgil's Underworld Journey’, provides insightful readings of Heaney's work that amply support her equally insightful thesis: ‘to be Virgilian’, she writes, ‘is to be Northern Irish in Heaney's writing. And to compare oneself to Aeneas is to take up the burden of the past’ (p. 183). Perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough treatment of Heaney's work in this collection, Falconer's essay adeptly weaves together the biographical, historical and poetic concerns that make Heaney's connection to Virgil seem fated in a way that orders much of his writing along the classical lines that she so adroitly draws out for us.

Taken as a whole, the essays in this collection offer the reader a comprehensive introduction to the massive – this volume shows that no other word will do – influence that classical literature had on Heaney, both as a translator and a poet. This book alone should turn the tide whenever Heaney's verse is taught, analysed or discussed: not to mention his engagement with classical literature, whether in passing or in a full-throated investigation of it, would be to misrepresent Heaney's engagement with his country, his culture and the position of them both in world literature.