Great Irish Writers - Seamus Heaney

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SEAMUS HEANEY
1939-

Heaney was born in Co. Londonderry on 13 April 1939. His father was a farmer and cattle-dealer, and Heaney was the eldest of nine children. He attended the nearby Anahorish School until he was twelve, when he went as a boarder to St Columb’s College in Londonderry. He then studied English Language and Literature at Queen’s University in Belfast, graduating with first class honours in 1961.
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In 1962 he joined the staff of St Thomas’s Intermediate School in Ballymurphy, one of Belfast’s most deprived Catholic districts. Its headmaster was Michael McLaverty, a respected author of novels and short stories, who introduced Heaney to the work of Patrick Kavanagh. Heaney realised that he too could find poetic inspiration in a not dissimilar rural background.
He was also encouraged by the poet Philip Hobsbaum, who had recently joined the English department at Queen’s University. Hobsbaum brought together a group of young poets (among them Michael Longley and Derek Mahon) who met to discuss each other’s work. Heaney’s poems began to appear in newspapers and magazines, and in 1966 Faber & Faber published Death of a Naturalist, which won the Somerset Maugham Award and other literary prizes. When Hobsbaum moved to Glasgow in 1966, Heaney was appointed to a lectureship in his place. A second volume of verse, Door into the Dark, followed in 1969.

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Heaney spent 1970-71 at the University of California at Berkeley. After a further year in Belfast, he gave up his lectureship and moved with his family to the greater safety of a cottage near Ashford, Co. Wicklow. His work continued to enjoy critical acclaim. Wintering Out (1972) was followed by North (1975), which won the Duff Cooper Prize. The collection of Bog Poems (1975) acknowledged a debt to P.V. Glob’s The Bog People, a study of Iron Age ritual killings in Jutland, in which Heaney saw parallels with contemporary Ireland.

In 1975 Heaney returned to the security of a salaried post, lecturing at Carysfort Training College in Dublin. He remained there until 1981, and made his home in the city. A new collection, Field Work, appeared in 1979. It contained an elegy for the late American poet, Robert Lowell, from whom Heaney had received the Duff Cooper award. Lowell had held a poetry workshop at Harvard University, and Heaney was offered the opportunity to teach there for part of the year. In 1984 he was elected to the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory, letting him divide his time between Ireland and America.

He remains a prolific writer. Later volumes of verse include Station Island (1984), The Haw Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1991), and The Spirit Level (1996). There have been collections of Selected Poems (1980 and 1990) and Preoccupations: Selected Prose (1980). His translations have ranger from Sweeney Astray (1983), drawn from a medieval Irish poem, to The Cure at Troy (1990), from Sophocles’ play Philoctetes. He co-edited two verse anthologies with Ted Hughes, the British Poet Laureate. In 1989, Heaney was elected to a five-year term as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. A coveted distinction, it proved a precursor to the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. Heaney’s 1999 translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf won him the Whitbread award.

Lowell described Heaney as ‘the best Irish poet since W.B. Yeats’, though he has contributed fewer memorable lines to everyday conversation. A part of his popularity is a modest but persuasive manner, as effective in a poetry reading as in a television documentary. Of his Irishness there is no doubt. When he was included in an anthology of contemporary British poetry, he replied with An Open Letter (1983), a poem pointing out that ‘My passport’s green./No glass of ours was ever raised/To toast The Queen.’

Bellaghy Bawn in the town of Bellaghy, in Co. Londonderry has a permanent exhibition on the poetry of Seamus Heaney.

Extract from Great Irish Writers by Martin Wallace, published by Appletree Press.

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