Old English poetry is a somewhat improbable recent success story, in an era when formal study of classical literature and even the study of modern languages have been in decline in England. The most prominent success was Seamus Heaney’s verse translation of Beowulf in 1999, a volume which won prizes in competition not only with other poetry books but with books in all literary categories. Important as the positive reception of Heaney’s marvellous translation was, it was not a sole cause of the new popularity of Old English poetry. His book was also a confirmation of the popularity of this poetry with English poets dating back to the Victorian period and strengthening amongst Modernist poets in the earlier twentieth century. Heaney’s predecessors here include Longfellow, Hopkins, Auden, Pound and Edwin Morgan. Some Old English poems, such as The Wanderer, The Seafarer and Wulf and Eadwacer are amongst the most widely translated items in the twentieth century. There have been a number of attempts to identify what quality it was that commended these poems so much to the modern taste, in particular to that of the Modernists; a recurrent phrase is ‘the power of the half-stated’. Auden’s enthusiasm is much quoted: ‘I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish … Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry have been one of my strongest, most lasting influences.’ In the main part of this essay I want to concentrate on what Auden might mean by ‘influences’, trying to describe what qualities in Old English poetry were found useful and expressive for writers in English of later periods.