Seamus Heaney

Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright, and translator, born on 13 April 1939 at Mossbawn, the family farmhouse near Castledawson in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. He was the first of nine children. His family later moved to nearby Bellaghy, which became the family home. By the time of his death on 30 August 2013, Heaney had become one of the most widely read poets of his age. In 1995 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and after his death The Independent described him as “probably the best-known poet in the world.”

Heaney’s first major published volume, Death of a Naturalist, appeared in 1966 and remains among his best-known works. It won several awards, including the Gregory Award for Young Writers and the Geoffrey Faber Prize, and began his long association with Faber and Faber. Other major books followed, including Door into the Dark in 1969, Wintering Out in 1972, North in 1975, Field Work in 1979, Selected Poems 1965-1975 and Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 in 1980, The Spirit Level in 1996, and Beowulf: A New Verse Translation in 1999. The last two won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. With Ted Hughes, he edited The Rattle Bag in 1982 and The School Bag in 1997, anthologies meant to introduce poetry to young readers.

His education and early teaching gave him the start of his public life as a writer. He attended Anahorish Primary School, then won a scholarship at age twelve to St Columb’s College, a Roman Catholic boarding school in Derry. He studied English Language and Literature at Queen’s University Belfast from 1957, graduating in 1961 with First Class Honours. At Queen’s he found Ted Hughes’s Lupercal, an encounter that spurred him to write poetry. He later trained as a teacher at St Joseph’s Teacher Training College in Belfast and taught at St Thomas’ Secondary Intermediate School in Ballymurphy, where the writer Michael McLaverty introduced him to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh. Heaney began publishing poems in 1962.

The sources of Heaney’s imagination were close to home. His father, Patrick Heaney, was a farmer and cattle dealer; his mother, Margaret Kathleen McCann, came from a family connected with a local linen mill. Heaney remarked on the inner tension between the rural Gaelic past represented by his father and the industrialized Ulster represented by his mother. A deep family loss also entered his work: while Heaney was at St Columb’s, his four-year-old brother Christopher was killed in a road accident in February 1953. The poems “Mid-Term Break” and “The Blackbird of Glanmore” are related to that death. In Belfast, the Belfast Group, organized by Philip Hobsbaum, brought him into contact with other poets, including Derek Mahon and Michael Longley.

Heaney’s career moved between Ireland, Britain, and the United States. He lectured at St Joseph’s College in Belfast in the early 1960s, was appointed a lecturer in Modern English Literature at Queen’s University Belfast in 1966, taught as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970–1971, and moved to Wicklow in 1972 to write full time. In 1976 he became Head of English at Carysfort College in Dublin and moved with his family to Sandymount, where he lived until his death. He was a professor at Harvard from 1981 to 1997, Harvard’s Poet in Residence from 1988 to 2006, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1989 to 1994. His headstone at St. Mary’s Church, Bellaghy, bears a line from “The Gravel Walks”: “Walk on air against your better judgement.” It is a fitting close for a poet whose words keep speaking because they join memory, craft, place, and human feeling with rare clarity.