[warning, while doing the reading I covered poetry that is not within the anthology; all these poems are easy to find online and named. Hope I don't cause you too much distress!]
The most particular similarity I noted was the poetry of MacNeice and Heaney. Both seemed to be debating the actual point of poetry - why was it, exactly that they were writing in verse? I came to the conclusion that it was to express dissatisfactions with political situations that wouldn't have been able to suffice in prose. MacNeice finds his reason in Autumn Journal - to illustrate the "the ranks/ Of men [that] are ranks of men, no more cyphers" (Autumn Journal, extract from Norton Anthology, line 31-32). Poetry is a riposte to the ideological constructs that dominated in the 30s that would "dragoon [MacNeice] me into a lethal automaton,/ would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with/ one face, a thing" ['Prayer before birth' from Selected Poems, London: Faber, 1980, 94]. As MacNeice says
Envying and despising unreflective things
Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting
And young girls doing their hair and all the castles of sand
Flushed by the childrenæs bedtime, level with the shore.
The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want
To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence,
I do not want to be a tragic or philosophic chorus
But to keep my eye only on the nearer future
And after that let the sea flow over us.
Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed
That no one hears them among the talk and laughter.
Wolves (selected Poems, pg.23, written 1934)
Poetry has become a medium to protest against the political disturbances of fascism. Likewise Heaney uses his poetry to protest against the Irish Troubles:
And whatever you say, you say nothing.
Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:
Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,
Subtle discrimination by addresses
With hardly an exception to the rule
That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod
And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,
Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
Where half of us, as in a wooden horse
Were cabin'd and confined like wily Greeks,
Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.
from part III 'Whatever you say, you say nothing', New Selected Poems: 1966-89 (Faber: London, 2009), pg 79
It is through poetry that Heaney is able to show the ridiculousness of discrimination and expose the divides between Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland. What the discrimination is exposed for is an organised pettiness, people reduced to scouring address books to find out who they are to avoid. The comparison to the Trojan horse adds a farcical layer to the whole scenario - those within the Horse are shut off, excluded from the world, 'Besieged within the siege' - no longer are they 'wily' but entrapped themselves.
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