Seamus heaney as a non political poet

SEAMUS HEANEY AS NON-POLITICAL POET.
It is easy to get the impression that Heaney is a political and provincial poet, concerned only with the happenings of his island and his memory. Some critics have placed Heaney in a no-win situation; he is condemned either for confronting too strongly the situation in his homeland, or taken to task for remaining aloof from it. As one can connote his awareness and caring attitude from ‘the boot of the law’, ‘the heavy ledger’, ‘the polished holster’, and ‘imagining the black hole in the barracks from “A Constable Calls” and ‘armoured cars’, ‘warbling along on powerful wheels’, ‘my roads’; and ‘I had the right of way’ from “The Toome Road”.
That finale, however, would be misleading. He is not merely a one-note minstrel; his birthplace does not completely occupy his mind. “Casting and Gathering “demonstrates his exploration of the poetic process. Like "Digging" and “Personal Helicon”. This short lyric attends to his own imagination. His descriptive powers are akin to Wordsworth's, and his attention to the world around him and detail of the poems make it a small success.
Heaney imbues with Joseph Brodsky that the only thing poetry and politics have in common “are the letters P and O”. He is of the view that poet should be well aware of his surroundings, especially when there is bloodshed, and that he must perform his role as much as he can. But he does not want to be identified with hacklers. In his essay “There dress of Poetry”, he is at crusade against hacklers who have made poetry a source of propaganda.
"There is no getting around that there is a political component to the decision-making," said Jonathan Galassi, editor in chief at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Heaney's New York publisher. "But this has been a long time coming, and it couldn't go to a more popular, beloved person."
The poem in this archive, “Personal Helicon” introduces an abiding interest, a concern for that which lies deep within the earth. It is dedicated to Michael Longley, another member of Hobsbaum's group. Mount Helicon is a mountain in Greece, that was, in classical mythology, sacred to Apollo and the Muses. From it flowed two fountains of poetic inspiration. Heaney is here presenting his own source of inspiration, the "dark drop" into personal and cultural memory, made present by the depths of the wells of his childhood. Now, as a man, he is too mature to scramble about on hands and knees, looking into the deep places of the earth, but he has his poetry. This serves as his glimpse into places where "there is no reflection," but only the sound of a rhyme, like a bucket, setting "the darkness echoing." This is the final poem in his first volume, and, together with his first poem in that volume, "Digging," acts as a bookend to the collection, utilizing this successful metaphor.
Robert Lowell has deemed Heaney "the most important Irish poet since Yeats. “Critics have been largely positive about his verse, and he is undoubtedly the most popular poet writing in English today. His books sell by the tens of thousands, and hundreds of "Heaney boppers" attend his readings. His earliest influences, Robert Frost and Ted Hughes, can be seen throughout his work, but most especially in his “A Constable calls”, and “The Toome Road”, where he recollects images of his childhood at Mossbawn. Other poets, especially Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, and even Dante have played important in this context.