How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and to his contemporary world? These are the questions addressed by Seamus Heaney in this collection of his critical prose. There are essays from three previous collections of prose and from The Place of Writing, a series of lectures delivered in 1988 at Emory University. Also included are several pieces not previously collected in volume form, ranging from short newspaper articles to more extended lectures and contributions to books, including Place and Displacement (1984), only available previously as a pamphlet, and Burns's Art Speech, written for the bicentennial of Robert Burns's death.