This collection of current, critical essays explores Irish poet Seamus Heaney's aesthetic consciousness as it fuses a variety of discourses into revelatory poetic texts. The collection differs from previous volumes in that its essays, while offering a wide variety of approaches, all concern themselves with the central critical issue of Heaney's artistic "shaping." Arranged loosely in a chronological pattern corresponding to Heaney's poetic career, the essays offer insights into concerns ranging from Heaney's reshaping of the mythological, to his use of individual images, to the influence of such "mentors" as Dante and Joyce, to Heaney's attempts to shape the numinous, to his unique rendering of the words of others through translation.