Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney, born in 1939, Irish poet, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for literature. Heaney was born in a small agricultural town 48 km (30 mi) northeast of Belfast in Northern Ireland. In 1957 he went to Belfast to study literature at Queen's University, where he returned as a lecturer in 1965. Troubled by the continuing violence between the Roman Catholics and Protestants, Heaney moved to the Republic of Ireland in 1972. He taught at Carysfort College in Dublin from 1975 to 1980. Later, he taught at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and at the University of Oxford, in England.

Heaney's poetry, beginning with Death of a Naturalist (1966), is rooted in the physical, rural surroundings of his childhood in Northern Ireland. Heaney's poems are often short, punctuated by the intensity of his language. His powerful words contrast sharply with the silence of the people he describes. His other books of poetry include Door into the Dark (1969); Wintering Out (1972); North (1975); The Haw Lantern (1987), which contains a sequence of elegies in sonnet form for his mother's death; Seeing Things (1991), which includes elegies for his father; The Spirit Level (1996), a study in spiritual balance; and Electric Light (2001), which contains elegies to departed friends and poems about places. Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 was published in 1998. Heaney’s critical essays are collected in Preoccupations (1980), Government of the Tongue (1988), and The Redress of Poetry (1995). Heaney's modern English translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf reached best-seller lists in the United States and the United Kingdom in the spring of 2000.