"Soon people are going to start comparing him to Yeats", wrote Clive James of Seamus Heaney, a cunningly self-fulfilling prophecy. Actually Heaney has about as much in common with Yeats as he has with Longfellow, but he is, you see, Irish, and what more obvious to compare one Irishman to than another? Isn't there something unwittingly racist about this way of thinking? Why should a Southern Protestant pseudo-Ascendency crypto-fascist who died in 1939 be presumed to be comparable to a contemporary Northern Catholic of peasant stock, just because of the abstract fact of their shared Irishness?