Heaney, Seamus

Born on 13 April 1939, Irish poet, playwright, critic, and translator Seamus Justin Heaney (1939–), received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995 for the lyrical beauty and integrity of his work. The eldest of nine children, Seamus Heaney was born thirty-five miles northwest of Belfast on the small farm of "Mossbawn" near Castledawson, Co. Derry, Northern Ireland, where his father raised cattle. A gifted student, in 1957 Heaney entered Queens University, Belfast, where he was influenced by the poetry of Ted Hughes and Gerard Manley Hopkins and by Anglo-Saxon literature. Heaney married Marie Devlin in 1965 and published his first volume of poems, The Death of a Naturalist, in 1966. Childhood memories, disappointments, fears, and losses that are buried in the land and language and must be "dug up" by the poet are central to Death of a Naturalist as well as to his subsequent books, Door into the Dark (1969) and Wintering Out (1972). During the late 1960s, while teaching at Queens University, Heaney—a constitutional nationalist—became involved in the civil-rights movement for Catholic equality in Northern Ireland. He later moved his family from Belfast to Glanmore Cottage in County Wicklow in 1972. While in Wicklow, Heaney worked as a freelance journalist and published his most highly regarded book, North, in 1975. North was Heaney's most profound historical and mythological exploration of the violence in Northern Ireland. The Heaneys relocated in 1976 to Dublin, where they still reside. During the 1980s Heaney began teaching at Harvard University and helped to launch the Derry-based multicultural art alliance Field Day Theatre Company. Ancient Irish poetry as well as writers as diverse as Wordsworth and Dante and James Joyce and Patrick Kavanagh informed Heaney's Field Work (1979), Sweeney Astray (1983), and Station Island (1984). The Haw Lantern (1989) revealed the influence of contemporary eastern European writers and the increasing internationalization of Heaney's work. The pastoral gave way to the political and the transcendent, and the earthy language of his early work became more abstract and translucent in Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996), and Electric Light (2001). These global shifts are recorded in Heaney's prose collections Preoccupations (1980), The Government of the Tongue (1988), and The Redress of Poetry (1995). However, it was the Derry dialect of his youth that inspired Heaney's highly acclaimed translation of Beowulf (1999) and reconfirmed his position in the pantheon of Irish poets.

Heaney, Seamus

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