07/05/2026
ETS Seminar #10: Stephen Regan on Yeats and Heaney
• Wednesday 13 May, 4.00-5:30pm
• 4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne
Throughout his career, Seamus Heaney reflected on the poetry of W. B. Yeats as an example of both formal accomplishment and exemplary poetic outlook. Particular works by Yeats, including ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, ‘The Tower’ and ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, became touchstones for his own poetic practice, calling for vigilance in the face of political violence and social upheaval. The influence of Yeats is strongly marked in poems by Heaney such as ‘Singing School’ and ‘Casualty’, but the presence of his illustrious predecessor is also evident in the later, visionary poems of Seeing Things, in which Heaney both earnestly and light-heartedly composes ‘Set questions for the ghost of W.B.’ This lecture will seek to show how Heaney’s critical understanding of Yeats changes and develops in keeping with his own energetic self-development. It will propose that Heaney’s relationship with Yeats was never simply one of assent, but rather one of complex engagement, adjustment and refinement, out of which came some of his most powerful poems and prose.
Stephen Regan is Professor Emeritus at Durham University and also an honorary member of staff in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He previously taught at Ruskin College, Oxford and Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Irish Writing: An Anthology of Irish Literature in English 1789-1939 (OUP, 2004), The Sonnet (OUP, 2019) and The Penguin Book of Elegy, co-edited with Andrew Motion in 2023. He is one of the editors of the forthcoming Oxford History of Poetry in English, with responsibility for modern British and Irish poetry.
