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Portrait of Seamus Heaney

Literature · Poets

Seamus Heaney

1939–2013 · Irish (born in Northern Ireland)

Contemporary Irish poetry

Seamus Heaney, born on a farm in County Londonderry, became the most celebrated Irish poet since Yeats and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His poems move from the rural childhood of Death of a Naturalist to the Iron Age bog bodies of North, which he used to explore the violence of the Troubles. He was also a major translator, notably of Beowulf, and an influential critic and teacher at Harvard and Oxford.

How to spot them

  • ▸"Digging": the poet will dig with his pen as his father and grandfather dug with spades
  • ▸Bog poems such as "The Tollund Man" and "Punishment"; the Troubles
  • ▸Mossbawn farm, County Londonderry; later home at Glanmore, County Wicklow
  • ▸Nobel Prize 1995; translation of Beowulf; nicknamed 'Famous Seamus'

Key works

Death of a Naturalist (1966)

Debut collection of rural childhood poems, including 'Digging', 'Blackberry-Picking' and 'Mid-Term Break'

Wintering Out (1972)

Collection containing 'The Tollund Man', about an Iron Age body found in a Danish bog

North (1975)

Bog-body poems such as 'Punishment' confronting ancient and modern sectarian violence

Field Work (1979)

Written after his move to Glanmore, including the Glanmore Sonnets

Station Island (1984)

Title sequence set on a pilgrimage to Lough Derg, meeting ghosts including James Joyce

The Cure at Troy (1990)

Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes, with the much-quoted lines about hope and history rhyming

The Spirit Level (1996)

Collection that won the Whitbread Book of the Year

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (1999)

Translation of the Old English epic, also Whitbread Book of the Year

Key ideas

  • Poetry rooted in the physical detail of rural Ulster life and the sounds of language
  • The bog as a 'memory bank' linking ancient sacrifice with contemporary Northern Irish violence
  • Poetry as a place where hope and history might rhyme, and as a form of redress

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born at Mossbawn farm near Castledawson, County Londonderry, the eldest of nine children
  • •Studied at Queen's University Belfast and was part of the Belfast Group of poets
  • •'Mid-Term Break' recalls the death of his four-year-old brother Christopher in a road accident
  • •Moved to Glanmore, County Wicklow, in 1972, and later lived in Dublin
  • •Oxford Professor of Poetry 1989–1994 and long-time professor at Harvard
  • •Nobel Prize in Literature 1995 'for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past'
  • •District and Circle won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2006
  • •A director of the Field Day Theatre Company with the playwright Brian Friel
  • •Died in Dublin on 30 August 2013; his last words, texted to his wife, were 'Noli timere' ('Don't be afraid')
  • •Buried in Bellaghy, County Londonderry

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources