Seamus Heaney is the foremost Irish poet since Yeats and one of the most popular poets writing in English today. The poetry and criticism of the Nobel Prize Winner are of indisputable importance to contemporary literature, his influence growing with each new work. This fourth edition of The Art of Seamus Heaney is the latest in a series of ongoing critical responses to Heaney's work. It adds new essays on Heaney's most recent books by critics, Tim Kendall, John Goodby and Helen Phillips, to those by Helen Vendler, Douglas Dunn, Edna Longley, Anne Stevenson, Bernard O'Donoghue, Philip Hobsbaum and Ciaran Carson among others. The book also features the facsimiles of the drafts of "North"-one of Heaney's most important early poems-which allow the reader to follow its development.