W.H.Auden, were he alive, would be 100 this year. He said once: “In spite of all this einsam rubbish, poets are no lonelier than anyone else. Poetry itself is lonely, of course, in the sense that few people read it.” This is typical Auden, levelling mythical superstructures with a single quip; honest to the bitter end, even when that honesty meant admitting the uselessness of his own occupation (’poetry makes nothing happen’) or consigning a whole poem to the bin, as he did with ‘September 1, 1939′ because it was, as he put it, ‘infected with an incurable dishonesty’. But since his death in 1973 Auden’s reputation, which was dogged during his life by criticism of his flight to America after the beginning of the War, has enjoyed a popular revival. This renewed interest- an interest that is genuinely popular and not just scholarly-most probably rests on the appeal of just two poems from Auden’s entire output: “Stop all the clocks” and the previously mentioned “September 1, 1939″.

Seamus Heaney, laureate-in-exile and the unchallenged patriarch of living English-language poets, returns to us now–with a new volume of poems–almost unchanged after more than forty years in print.