Abstract This essay revisits Seamus Heaney’s relationship with T. S. Eliot via the famous passage on memory in Little Gidding (III, 7–15). Special attention is paid to revising Anthony J. Cuda’s discussion of Eliot in Heaney’s early poetry by first reconsidering the displacement of the Eliot passage in North and then taking the story further, into Heaney’s later poetry. In doing so, the essay revises our general understanding of the relationship between the two poets over time. Dante and Station Island (1984) come under special scrutiny as pivotal moments in Heaney’s general revaluation of Eliot. Two later poems, in particular, are read in light of Eliot’s continuing presence in Heaney’s imagination: the closing poem, ‘Electric Light’, in the 2001 volume bearing that name, and ‘The Blackbird of Glanmore’, which concludes District and Circle (2006). The essay ends with a general assessment of the two poets, underscoring elements of distance and difference.
J.A. Post (Wed,) studied this question.