Seamus Heaney
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Seamus Justin Heaney (b. April 13, 1939) is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer from County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.
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Life
Seamus Heaney was born, the eldest of nine children, on a farm called Mossbawn, in County Londonderry, thirty miles to the north-west of Belfast, in Northern Ireland. He was brought up a Catholic and a nationalist (and therefore would call his birthplace County Derry, not County Londonderry). He regards himself as Irish, not British, as he made known publicly when some publication referred to him as "British", due to the status of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. As a child he remembered watching American soldiers practising for the D-Day landings. The family moved to a bigger farm, at Bellaghy, in 1953.
He was educated at the local primary school and St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school in Derry to which he was awarded a scholarship. At St Columb's he was taught the Irish language. He then attended Queen's University, Belfast. In the 1960s, Heaney trained as a teacher and taught in St. Thomas's Secondary School in the deprived, militantly anti-British Ballymurphy neighborhood of West Belfast. The headmaster of this school was the writer Michael MacLaverty from County Monaghan, who introduced Heaney to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh. It was at this time that he first started to publish poetry, beginning in 1962. His first book, 'Eleven [Poem]]s', was published in 1965 for The Queen's University Festival. A year later, Faber and Faber published a full collection called 'Death of a Naturalist'. This collection met with much critical acclaim. In 1965 he met and married Marie Devlin. (Devlin is a writer herself and in 1994 published Over Nine Waves a collection of traditional Irish myths and legends.) They had three children.
Throughout the 1960s, he was working, at formal meetings, with a number of writers including Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Philip Hobsbaum. In the 1970s, younger poets attended these meetings, now run by Heaney, including Paul Muldoon and Frank Ormsby. In 1968, with Michael Longley, Heaney took part in a reading tour called 'Room to Rhyme'; this led to quite a lot of exposure for the poet's work. He was appointed to the Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland in 1974. He became an elected Saoi of Aosdána. In 1972, Heaney left his lectureship at Belfast and moved to the Republic, working as a teacher at Carysfort College in Dublin.
In 1984, Heaney was appointed Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. In 1989, he was elected to be Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, which he held for a five-year term to 1994 (not requiring residence in Oxford). Every other holder of this post had been British, although one of his successors, Paul Muldoon, is a Northern Irish poet. Throughout this time he was publishing prolifically and dividing his time between Ireland and America. He also continued to give public readings, which were very popular. So well attended and keenly anticipated were these events that those who queued for tickets with such enthusiasm have sometimes been dubbed 'Heaneyboppers' suggesting an almost pop-music fanaticism on the part of his supporters. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.
In 1996, his collection, The Spirit Level won The Whitbread Book of the Year Award, a feat repeated in 1999 by his translation of the epic Beowulf.
Career
His work often deals with "the local"—that is, his surroundings and everything inclusive of them. Inevitably this means Ireland, and particularly Northern Ireland. Hints of sectarian violence, which began just as his writing career did, can be found in many of his poems, even works that on the surface appear to deal with something else. Despite his many travels much of his work appears to be set in rural Derry, the county of his childhood. Like the troubles themselves, Heaney's work is deeply associated with the lessons of history, sometimes even prehistory. Many of his works concern his own family history and focus on characters in his own family, they can be read as elegies for those family members. He has acknowledged this trend.
The Anglo-Saxon influences in his work are also noteworthy, his university study of the language having had a profound effect on his work. It also led to a small revival of interest in the verse forms of Anglo-Saxon poetry amongst a number of poets influenced by Heaney. He has also written critically well regarded essays and two plays. His essays, among other things, have been credited with beginning the critical re-examination of Thomas Hardy. His anthologies (edited with friend Ted Hughes) The Rattle Bag and The School Bag are used extensively in schools in the UK and elsewhere. In addition to his original works, Heaney has published translations, including a highly regarded verse translation of Beowulf from Old English in 1999, and of Sophocles' Antigone in 2004.
His influence on contemporary poetry is reckoned to be immense. Robert Lowell has called Heaney "the most important Irish poet since Yeats". A good many others have echoed the sentiment. His influence is not restricted to Ireland but is felt world wide. However some critics have attacked Heaney for not dealing more directly with the political situation in Northern Ireland. His Nobel Prize nomination ran "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
Bibliography
Poetry
- Death of a Naturalist (Faber & Faber, 1966)
- Door into the Dark (Faber & Faber, 1969)
- Wintering Out (Faber & Faber, 1972)
- Stations (Ulsterman Publications, 1975)
- North (Faber & Faber, 1975)
- Field Work (Faber & Faber, 1979)
- Selected Poems 1965-1975 (Faber & Faber, 1980)
- Station Island (Faber & Faber, 1984)
- The Haw Lantern (Faber & Faber, 1987)
- New Selected Poems 1966-1987 (Faber & Faber, 1990)
- Seeing Things (Faber & Faber, 1991)
- The Spirit Level (Faber & Faber, 1996)
- Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 (Faber & Faber, 1998)
- Electric Light (Faber & Faber, 2001)
Translations
- Sweeney Astray: A version from the Irish (Field Day, 1983)
- The Midnight Verdict (Gallery Press, 1993)
- JAN KOCHANOWSKI: Laments (Faber & Faber, 1995)
- Beowulf (Faber & Faber, 1999)
- Diary of One who Vanished (Faber & Faber, 1999)
Essays
- Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (Faber & Faber, 1980)
- The Government of the Tongue (Faber & Faber, 1988)
- The Place of Writing (Emory University, 1989)
- The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (Faber & Faber, 1995)
- Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture (Gallery Press, 1995)
- Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (Faber & Faber, 2002)
Plays
- The Cure at Troy A version of Sophocles' Philoctetes (Field Day, 1990)
- The Burial at Thebes A version of Sophocles' Antigone (Faber & Faber, 2004)
About Heaney
- A Collection of Critical Essays Ed. by Elmer Andrews (1993)
