SEAMUS HEANEY: A NOBEL PRIZE FOR AN IRISH POET

Seamus Heaney  (1939-2013)

Seamus Heaney  was an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born near Castledawson, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, the family moved to nearby Bellaghy when he was a boy. Heaney became a lecturer at St. Joseph's College in Belfast in the early 1960s, after attending Queen's University and began to publish poetry. He lived in Sandymount, Dublin, Republic of Ireland, from 1976 until his death. He also lived part-time in the United States from 1981 to 2006. Heaney was recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry during his lifetime.

More information: Poetry Foundation

Heaney was a professor at Harvard from 1981 to 1997, and its Poet in Residence from 1988 to 2006. From 1989 to 1994, he was also the Professor of Poetry at Oxford. In 1996, was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres. Other awards that he received include the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the E. M. Forster Award (1975), the PEN Translation Prize (1985), the Golden Wreath of Poetry (2001), the T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two Whitbread Prizes (1996 and 1999). In 2011, he was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize and in 2012, a Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust. His literary papers are held by the National Library of Ireland.

American poet Robert Lowell described him as the most important Irish poet since Yeats, and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was the greatest poet of our age. Robert Pinsky has stated that with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller. Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as probably the best-known poet in the world. One of his best known works is Death of a Naturalist, published in 1966. His work often deals with the local surroundings of Ireland, particularly in Northern Ireland, where he was born and lived until young adulthood. 

His body is buried at the Cemetery of St. Mary's Church, Bellaghy, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. The headstone bears the epitaph Walk on air against your better judgement, from one of his poems.

More information: Interesting Literature

When a poem rhymes, when a form generates itself, 

when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, 

it is already on the side of life. 

When a rhyme surprises and extends the fixed relations between words, that in itself protests against necessity. 

When language does more than enough, 

as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, 

and rebels at limit.

Seamus Heavey