ABSTRACT
Seamus Heaney begins his Oxford lecture on the poetry of Clare Wills, 'John Clare's Prog', by discussing a change that he made to the opening line of his early poem, 'Follower'. the story encodes an aspect of Heaney's relationship to the English language that is entwined with the shaping mythology of his best known and most celebrated work: a mythology that powerfully but questionably aligns aspects of language, gender, nationality and religion. The implication that Heaney's 'civilized outrage' is superficial and willed, while the 'tribal' understanding is profound and authentic is shocking, but obviously deliberate: Heaney has taken the measure of the shock, is deliberately challenging an English reader, or any reader whose sense of self is not bound up with an embattled and oppressed community. Heaney writes very illuminatingly about W. B. Yeats and Johns Hopkins despite the problematic nature of his vocabulary.
