‘Finding a voice’, Heaney once wrote, ‘means that you can get your own feeling into your own words and that your words have the feel of you about them’ (P 43). Yet ‘the discovery of a way of writing that is natural and adequate to your sensibility’, he maintained, involves tuning in to other voices:

The theory of influence elaborated by Heaney in ‘Feeling into Words’ deflects the impulse to emulate (‘Ah, I wish I had said that’) into a process of absorption and incorporation. He naturalizes this process by describing it in terms of physiological receptivity, and by offering the implicit analogy of a water course: the hyphen he gives to ‘influence’ highlights the idea of ‘inflowing’ or ‘influx’ as conveyed in the first dictionary sense of the word. In the course of naturalizing one writer's engagement with the works of others, it is as if the distinction between ‘envies’ and ‘identifications’ (to summon the key words of another Heaney essay) is wishfully elided. Yet the distinction between conscious and unconscious imitation remains, reminding us that to be ‘influenced’ is not a merely passive activity. Heaney returns briefly to this point later in ‘Feeling into Words’ when he differentiates between the writer's ‘unconscious bedding’ in language and ‘a conscious savouring of words’ (46), and he runs with similar ideas in the two Preoccupations essays that follow: ‘The Makings of a Music’ plays Wordsworthian ‘surrender to the speech of the character’ against a Yeatsian poetics of ‘control’ and ‘manipulation’ (71), while ‘The Fire i’ the Flint’, Heaney's essay on Hopkins, contrasts an idea of composition as the product of mysterious incubation with a definition of poetry as formed through ‘conscious quelling and control of the materials, a labour of shaping’ (88).