Heaney had thought of writing a poem based on Lough Derg since the mid-1960s but it wasn't until he read Dante in the 1970s that what would become "Station Island" started to take shape. He states that, "Dante was the first mover of the sequence, no doubt about that. The experience of reading him in the 1970s was mighty, and translating the Ugolino episode appeared as the final poem in "Field Work", the volume published prior to "Station Island" was like doing press-ups, getting ready for something bigger." Before the long poem "Station Island" was published in 1984, as part of the collection by the same name, the first three sections of the poem appeared in altered form in "The Hudson Review" in 1983.