Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney (1939- ), Irish poet and critic. Heaney was born in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, the eldest of nine children and son of a Catholic farmer. Heaney was educated at Queen's College, Belfast, where he lectured between 1966 and 1972 before becoming a full-time writer. Heaney moved to County Wicklow, in the Republic of Ireland, in 1972, and taught in Dublin from 1975. He was a co-founder of the Field Day theatre company and co-editor, with English poet Ted Hughes, of the best-selling poetry anthology, The Rattle-Bag (1982). He was appointed Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard in 1984, and from 1989 to 1994 was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. As well as writing poetry he has also written plays and translations and produced collections of critical essays. In 1995 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He also won two Whitbread Book of the Year Awards—the first in 1996 for his collection The Spirit Level and the second in 2000 for his translation of the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. His other translations include the medieval Irish poem Buile Suibhne, as Sweeney Astray (1983), and the Sophocles plays Philoctetes, translated as The Cure at Troy (1991), and Antigone, as The Burial at Thebes (2004).

Heaney's poetry, from his early work in Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969) onward, has been rooted in the physical, rural contexts of his childhood. As his work has developed, from Wintering Out (1972) to Field Work (1979), these settings have become the focus for an archaeological uncovering of the myths and histories that have contributed towards, or formed the backdrop to, the violent and unhappy political situation in Ireland, which he has overtly treated only in North (1975), a collection which won many prizes and helped firmly establish his reputation, but which was criticized by some for mythologizing the violence in Ulster.

The tensions in Heaney's work between the competing demands of art and life, of past and present, and of violent action and peaceful contemplation are apparent even in the opening lines of the early poem “Digging”, which Heaney has described as “the first poem I wrote where I thought my feeling had got into words, or to put it more accurately, where I thought my feel had got into words”:

Heaney's work exhibits supple rhythms, but it is the intensity and sensuality of his language—his burrowing in what he calls the “word-hoard”—which has led to critical acclaim. Heaney's articulacy contrasts intensely with the curt dourness of the people he has come from and so lovingly describes, and the tension is obviously important to him. His later work, from the long narrative sequences in Station Island (1984) to the shorter lyrics in The Haw Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1991), and The Spirit Level (1995), includes love poems and elegies, and displays an increasing concern with metaphysical subjects and themes. By the time of Electric Light (2001) he is reflecting on the origins—and inevitable end—of his life and art. His 2006 collection District and Circle examines the ubiquitous violence of the modern world.

A comprehensive volume of Heaney's collected prose was published as Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 in 2002.