ABSTRACT
It has been generally agreed that the distinction of Heaney's criticism is that it is unmistakeably the work of a practitioner, thereby satisfying the demands of modernists since Eliot that the critic of poetry should, ideally, also be a poet. Up to a point Dante does have this centrality in The Government of the Tongue, but indirectly, through a modern poet who is central in the book: Mandelstam. Of all twentieth-century poets, Mandelstam can least be read without reference to the circumstances of the time in which he wrote. Criticism of Heaney has taken note of this aural bias. Heaney, as he claims all Dante-influenced poets do, seizes enthusiastically on the features of Mandelstam's Dante which he finds congenial. The paradox is that it is precisely this recognition of the impossibility of unmediated language that gives Heaney's poetry its characteristic force and precision.
