I read District and Circle (2006) in the context of a poetry of praise and the influence of Czesław Miłosz. Heaney’s poetry of praise is intimately connected to his sense of place and the title of the collection suggests that Heaney is circling back over his childhood district of Mossbawn. When Heaney turns to Virgil in his final collection Human Chain (2010), he does so partly in place of a Catholicism that has been increasingly displaced throughout his work. However, I conclude that the foundational questions of Heaney’s childhood faith – post-mortem existence, how we commune with the dead, the longing for something beyond the bounds of material sense – account, in part, for his turning to Virgil and, specifically, to Book VI of the Aeneid, a full translation of which was posthumously published in 2016. In the end, in a synthesis of Christian and Classical, Heaney’s poetry finds a unifying vision which allows him to retain a felt sense for his Catholic upbringing even as he moves beyond its orthodox expression.

This chapter frames Heaney’s long investment in Eastern Europe in the intersecting contexts of the Cold War and the Troubles. From 1970 on, Heaney read, promoted and translated poets from behind the Iron Curtain. The same Anglo-American poetic and academic climate that alerted Heaney to the presence of Eastern European poets also led him to turn to these poets to resolve problems he had with the Anglo-American lyric in the context of Irish history and politics. The chapter pays particular attention to the influences of Osip Mandelstam and Czesław Miłosz on Heaney’s poetry from North to Electric Light, a volume that includes multiple elegies for Eastern European poets and Heaney's only poem set in Eastern Europe, 'The Known World'. Finally, this piece takes stock of the enduring impact of Eastern Europe on Heaney's imagination at the end of his life.