“I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.” Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) was an Irish poet, playwright, and translator. Though he received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, Heaney is considered one of the principal contributors to poetry during his lifetime.
Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, in Tamniaran, near Castledawson, Northern Ireland.
He was the oldest of nine children. His father, Patrick, was a farmer and cattle dealer. HIs mother, Margaret’s family worked at a local linen mill.
Heaney was awarded a scholarship to St. Columb’s College, a Roman Catholic boarding school in Derry when he was twelve years old (1951).
The family moved a few miles away to Bellaghy in 1953. Heaney played Gaelic football for Castledawson and did not change teams after the move to Bellaghy. In Bellaghy, he pursed more cultural activities such as joining the Bellaghy GAA Club and acting in amateur plays.
While he was at school his four-year-old brother, Christopher, died in a road accident (1953). Two of Heaney’s best-known poems, “Mid-Term Break” and “The Blackbird of Glanmore” are about his brother’s death.
Heaney studied English literature at Queen’s University Belfast. In interviews, He credited his decision to write poetry to finding a copy of Ted Hughes's Lupercal, while a student at the university.
After graduation, Heaney studied for his teacher’s certification at St. Joseph’s Teacher Training College in Belfast. He stared his teaching career at St. Thomas’ Secondary Intermediate School in Ballymurphy, Belfast. Michael Mc Laverty, the school’s headmaster was a writer. He introduced Heaney to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh. Under Mc Laverty’s mentorship, Heaney published his first poem in 1962. In the same year, he met Marie Devlin. They married in 1965.
While waiting to hear back from another publishing house about the publication of his first volume of poetry, Heaney decided to sign with Faber and Faber. Death of a Naturalist was published in 1966, and Faber and Faber remained his publishers for the rest of his life.
Death of a Naturalist was critically acclaimed and won several awards including the Gregory Award for Young Writers and the Geoffrey Faber Prize.
Heaney was promoted to lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, and he completed his second major volume of poetry, Door Into the Dark.
From 1970-1971, Heaney taught as a visiting professor at the University of California Berkley. In 1972, he gave up his lectureship in Belfast to move to Wicklow in Ireland to begin writing full-time. He published his third volume of poems in the same year. The following year, his daughter Catherine Ann (the oldest of his three children) was born.
In 1975, Heaney published his next volume of poems and a pamphlet of prose poems. The following year, he was appointed Head of English at Carysfort College in Dublin. His collection, Field Work was published in 1979 and Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 was published in 1980.
In 1981, the national Irish Arts Council was established and Heaney was elected into its first group of members. He received the Council’s highest honor in 1997 when he was elected a Saoi, one of the five elders.
Heaney made another visit to the United States in 1981 when he served as a visiting professor at Harvard where he became affiliated with Adam’s House, an undergraduate residential house commemorating the services of the Adams family (Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams).
He received two honorary doctorates, one from his alma mater, Queen’s University and the other from Fordham University in New York City.
Three years after his mother died and one year after his father’s death, Heaney published Clearances, a book of eight sonnets dedicated to his mother. Losing both parents so close together had a profound affect on him. He struggled to deal with his grief working through it as always in his poems. In 1988, The Government of the Tongue, a collection of critical essays was published.
In 1989, Heaney was elected Oxford Professor of Poetry, which he held for a five-year term. Since he was not required to live in Oxford, he was able to live in the United States or Ireland and travel to Oxford.
When Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Irish press asked him how it felt to join the ranks of famed Irish poets, Yeats, Shaw, and Beckett. He replied, “It’s like being a little foothill at the bottom of a mountain range. You hope you just live up to it. It’s extraordinary.”
In 2003, he was asked if any figure in pop culture aroused interest in poetry and lyrics. Without hesitation, he selected Eminem.
Throughout his life, Heaney stressed that he was Irish not British.
Minutes before his death, he texted “Noli timere,” Latin for “Be not Afraid” to his wife.
Heaney is buried in Bellaghy, Northern Ireland at St. Mary’s Church where his parents and several family members are also buried. The epitaph on his tombstone is “Walk on air against your better judgement,” from his poem “The Gravel Walks.”
Upon learning of Heaney’s death, former President Bill Clinton commented, “His uniquely Irish gift for language made him our finest poet of the rhythms of ordinary lives and a powerful voice for peace...His wonderful work, like that of his fellow Irish Nobel Prize winners Shaw, Yeats, and Beckett, will be a lasting gift for all the world.”
Some of Heaney’s most notable poems are “Personal Helicon,” “Digging,” “Blackberry-Picking,” “Borland,” and “Requiem for the Croppies.”
Selected Works:
Poetry: Main Collections
Death of a Naturalist 1966 The Haw Lantern 1987
Door Into the Dark 1969 Seeing Things 1981
Wintering Out 1972 The Spirit Level 1996
North 1975 Electric Light 2001
Field Work 1979 District and Circle 2006
Station Island 1984 Human Chain 2006
Prose: Main Collections
Preoccupations 1980
The Government of the Tongue 1988
The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures 1995
Steeping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney 2008
The Letters of Seamus Heaney 2023
Prose: Selected Editions
Finders Keepers 2001
Plays
The Cure at Troy: a version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes
The Burial at Thebes: A version of Sophocles’ Antigone