Seamus Heaney was born on April 13, 1939 near Castledawson in Northern Ireland to a Catholic farming family, of which he was the eldest of nine siblings. He attended St. Columb’s College, where he learned both Latin and Irish, and later, Queen’s University in Belfast. He attended both schools on scholarships. While at Queen’s, “he became one of an extraordinary group of Northern Irish poets from both Protestant and Catholic background” (Greenblatt). After university, Heaney became a teacher in Belfast, where he began to write poetry as a young man.
Marriage and Writing Career
In August of 1965, Heaney married the schoolteacher and writer, Marie Devlin of County Tyrone. He later became a professor at his university until becoming a citizen of the Irish Republic in 1972. It was then that he also began writing full-time. Heaney has since taught at Harvard and Oxford Universities. Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past" (Nobelprize.org).
Many scholars and critics view him as “the most gifted English-language poet of his generation” (Greenblatt). Heaney had published thirteen volumes of poetry by 2001, his first full volume entitled, Death of a Naturalist, which won many awards, including the Eric Gregory Award. “Two-thirds of the poetry collections sold in the UK the previous year [2008] had been Heaney titles. Such popularity is almost unheard of in the world of contemporary poetry” (Poetryfoundation.org). While Heaney's poetry is highly acclaimed by the academic world, the "common" man also enjoys reading it.
“Digging” and “Beowulf”
One of Heaney’s most popular poems is “Digging,” which is also the first poem in the volume, Death of a Naturalist. In “Digging,” Seamus “evokes the rural landscape where he was raised and comments on the skill and care with which his father and grandfather farmed the land. Heaney announces that as a poet he too will dig, but with a pen, uncovering layers of both personal memory and experience” (Seamusheaney.com).
In 1999, Heaney published his translation of the one thousand year old Anglo-Saxon poem, “Beowulf,” which won the Whitbread Award once again for Heaney, “beating off stiff competition from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (Gray).
Time Magazine’s Paul Gray also had many great things to say about Heaney’s translation of “Beowulf,” and writes, “Much that seemed off-putting about Beowulf to modern readers becomes, in Heaney's retelling, eerily intriguing instead” (Gray).
Sources
- Gray, Paul. “ There Be Dragons.” Time March 2000. 22 September 2009
- Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York:Norton and Company, 2006.
- “Seamus Heaney, Irish Poet.” Seamusheaney.com. 2009. 22 September 2009 (Site now offline).
- "Seamus Heaney, Bio." Poetryfoundation.org. 27 July 2011
- "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1995". Nobelprize.org. 12 Jun 2011
