Editing Seamus Heaney (section)

===Plays and prose===
His plays include ''The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes'' (1991). Heaney's 2004 play, ''[[The Burial at Thebes]],'' suggests parallels between [[Creon of Thebes|Creon]] and the foreign policies of the [[Presidency of George W. Bush|Bush administration]].<ref>{{Cite news |last=McElroy |first=Steven |date=21 January 2007 |title=The Week Ahead: Jan. 21 – 27 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/arts/21weekahead.html |access-date=21 January 2007 |work=The New York Times}}</ref>

Heaney's engagement with poetry as a necessary engine for cultural and personal change is reflected in his prose works ''The Redress of Poetry'' (1995) and ''[[Finders Keepers (Heaney collection)|Finders Keepers: Selected Prose: 1971–2001]]'' (2001).<ref name=poetry_foundation/>
{{blockquote|"When a poem rhymes," Heaney wrote, "when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life. When a rhyme surprises and extends the fixed relations between words, that in itself protests against necessity. When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit."<ref name=toibin_human_chain/>}}He continues: "The vision of reality which poetry offers should be transformative, more than just a printout of the given circumstances of its time and place".<ref name=toibin_human_chain/> Often overlooked and underestimated in the direction of his work is his profound poetic debts to and critical engagement with 20th-century Eastern European poets, and in particular Nobel laureate [[Czesław Miłosz]].<ref>Kay, Magdalena. ''In Gratitude for all the Gifts: Seamus Heaney and Eastern Europe.'' University of Toronto Press, 2012. {{ISBN|1-4426-4498-2}}</ref>