Introduction : Whose poetry is Old English anyway? -- 'Ear for the sea-surge' : Pound's uses of Old English -- Anglo-Saxon anxieties : Auden and 'the barbaric poetry of the north' -- Edwin Morgan : dredging the whale-roads -- Old English escape routes : Seamus Heaney - the Caedmon of the north -- Conclusion : Old English - a shadow poetry? -- Appendix on Old English metre.