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Seamus Heaney, the
Irish poet whose lyrical beauty and ethical depth won him the
Nobel Prize in
1995 and gave him a prominence far beyond literary circles, died in
Dublin on Friday after a brief illness, according to a statement issued on behalf of his family. He was 74.
Mr. Heaney was born on a family farm in
County Derry in
Northern Ireland but, as a
Catholic and a nationalist, chose to live in Dublin. His poems often mined the images of his childhood — the peat bogs, small towns and potato farms — and, in collections like
1975's "
North," delved into the sectarian violence that was ripping the North apart, exploring its sorrows and causes, though he avoided becoming a spokesman for the
Republican cause.
As his reputation grew in the
1980s and
1990s, he remained an accessible and public writer, a respected translator, broadcaster and, most importantly, a prolific poet with a gifted eye. Publishing more than a dozen major collections of poems between 1966 and
2010, he rose to become one of the most distinctive literary voices of the
20th century.
Robert Lowell described him as the "most important Irish poet since
Yeats."
"
Digging," the first poem in his first collection, "The
Death of a Naturalist," described his father digging potatoes and his grandfather digging turf. The last lines seemed to set down his personal manifesto:
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But
I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
And dig he did, producing a remarkable range of work: love poems, epic poems, poems about conflict and strife, odes to nature, poems addressed to friends, poems for the dead, poems that simply reveled in the sound of the
English language. After he gained fame with "
Death of
Naturalist," Mr. Heaney never eased his pace. His later volumes of poetry include "
The Spirit Level," "
District and Circle" and "Bog Poems."
Seamus Justin Heaney was born, the eldest of nine children, on April 13,
1939, on a farm called Mossbawn, in
County Londonderry, in the western part of the
British province of Northern Ireland.
His father,
Patrick, a cattle-dealer and farmer, was a dour, unliterary man, suspicious of verbiage. His mother was not literary, but, Mr. Heaney recalled, she used to "recite lists of affixes and suffixes, and
Latin roots, with their
English meanings, rhymes that formed part of her early schooling in the early part of the century."
All around him, he watched police and public officials of the predominantly
Protestant province treat
Catholics with disdain, sometimes with cruelty. One of his biographers,
Michael Parker, wrote that "It could be argued that while Heaney's exposure to what he now regards as 'cultural colonialism' may have bred feelings of inferiority and insecurity in the short term, in the long term it also honed his sense of identity and provided him with sustenance from two rich traditions."
He proved to be a bright boy and he was sent on a scholarship to
St. Columb's College in
Derry at the age of 12.
Later he studied for a degree in English at
Queen's University in
Belfast. He went to work as a schoolteacher, then a lecturer in English at
Queen's College and later at
Carysfort College, a teacher training college near Dublin. Then in
1972, he gave up full-time academic work to be a freelance writer.
For much of his career, he was under constant pressure to write favorably about the goals of his fellow Catholics, many of whom wanted a Northern Ireland free of British control, and though his work often concerned the violence in
Ulster, he saw both sides of the conflict and avoided polemics in support of the
Irish Republican Army. He said he was suspicious of extreme positions.
He resented British oppression in Northern Ireland, but admired much in
British culture and
English literature. He was rare among modern poets in that not only the vast majority of critics and academics praised him, but millions of readers also bought him. By some estimates he was the best-read living poet in the world in recent decades.
- published: 30 Aug 2013
- views: 1655