ABSTRACT
The twentieth-century debt to Romanticism, though unavoidable, is not always acknowledged by its inheritors, still less avowed. While intelligent poets and critics are happy to acknowledge Romantic influence in a general way, Seamus Heaney is relatively unusual, at least in the period following on from 1940s Neo-Romanticism, in specifically avowing and explicating a major debt to one Romantic poet, namely Wordsworth. The restoration of imagination is for Heaney to be found as much on the basis of poems like Michael or The Ruined Cottage as in the Intimations Ode or the more exalted passages of The Prelude, important though all of these are to him. Heaney appears to have been attracted in particular to the sense of an imagination at work on its locality. It is an imagination that includes a kind of fear, for the thoughts and fantasies of the speaker have an identifiably Gothic tinge.
