Seamus Heaney Biography and List of Works

Irish poet, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. According to Heaney, poetry balances the "scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium." From the early collections, Heaney has combined deep personal memories, his rural background and local subjects with a common Irish heritage.

"Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very remote. And when this intellectual predisposition co-exists with the actualities of Ulster and Israel and Bosnia and Rwanda and a host of other wounded spots on the face of the earth, the inclination is not only not to credit human nature with much constructive potential but not to credit anything too positive in the work of art."
(from Nobel Lecture, 1995)

Seamus Heaney was born near Castledawson, County Derry, and grew up on his father's cattle farm. He was the eldest in a Catholic family of nine children. Heaney attended St. Columb's College, Derry, and moved in 1957 to Belfast to continue his studies. In 1961 Heaney graduated from Queen's University, Belfast, and was then trained as teacher at St. Joseph's College of Education. After one year as a secondary school teacher Heaney returned to St. Josephs, where he was a lecturer for three years. In 1966 he became a lecturer at Queen University.

In 1972 Heaney gave up his work at Queen's. Partly to escape the turmoil and tensions of Belfast, he moved from to County Wicklow, where he was a freelance writer for three years. He then taught at Carysfort College of Education until 1981. Next year, after spending frequent periods as a guest professor at American universities, he was appointed visiting professor at Harvard. Since 1985 he has been there as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Between the years 1989 and 1994 he held a Professorship of Poetry at Oxford.

Heaney's first book, ELEVEN POEMS, appeared in 1965. He won the Eric Gregory Award with DEATH OF A NATURALIST in 1966, at the age of 27, and established his reputation as a poet. Heaney was in Belfast at the outbreak, in 1969, of what has become known as 'The Troubles'. In 1968-69 serious disturbances arose from Protestant political dominance and discrimination against the Roman Catholic minority in employment and housing. Catholic student arranged civil rights marches that had much similarity with protest movements elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. British troops were sent to restore peace in Belfast and Londonderry. Heaney left Belfast at the height of this conflict, but his work reflects his experiences of that time.

After NORTH (1975), in which Heaney addressed the ongoing civil strife in Northern Ireland, he was considered the finest Irish poet since W.B. Yeats, and with Ted Hughes among the leading poets in English. Heaney's works have developed from early clotted expression to greater simplicity and clarity. His poems are rooted in Northern Irish rural life, and draw on myth and unique aspects of the Irish experience. Heaney's reflections on his childhood gave way to darker commentaries on the social and political problems in Northern Ireland. In THE GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE (1988) Heaney questioned the role of poetry in modern society. The central symbol in the author's work is the bog, the wide unfenced county that reaches back millions of years. The bog is the staring point for the exploration of the past, the material and cultural remains of an ancient race, the older Norse and Viking worlds.

The political situation in Northern Ireland is explored in North and Field Work (1979), from the standpoint of Heaney's Catholic background. However, Heaney has been consistent in his refusal to reduce complex political and social issues to simple slogans. Strong individualistic, meditative mood marks his later works, including STATION ISLAND (1984), THE HAW LANTERN (1987), and SEEING THINGS (1991). His poems have often been allegorical and he has drawn on the Divine Comedy of Dante and on the work of such contemporary central European writers as Czeslaw Milosz. In his Nobel lecture in 1995 Heaney defended poetry "as the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive world politics.

Heaney's work as translator includes SWEENEY ASTRAY (1983), from the medieval Irish poem about an Irish king who went mad during a battle and was turned into a bird; THE CURE AT TROY (1991), Heaney's rendering into English of Sophocles' Philoctetes, and the Anglo-Saxon poem BEOWULF (1999), which was composed towards the end of the first millennium. The translation won the Whitebread Award as the best book of 1999.

"You have won renown: you are known to all
men far and near, now and forever.
Your sway is wide as the wind's home,
as the sea around cliffs."
(from Beowulf, trans. by Heaney)

The epic records the great deed of the heroic warrior Beowulf in his youth and maturity. The hero kills three monsters: a man-eater called Grendel, Grendel's aggrieved mother in her underwater dwelling, and 50 years later a fire-breathing dragon, which is stirred by the theft of a goblet. It mortally wounds Beowulf before expiring. The poem ends with Beowulf's funeral pyre. Central theme is the workings of fate (wyrd) in human lives. It is generally accepted that originally Beowulf was the work of a single poet, who has recounted legends that were passed down orally from several centuries earlier. Heaney's retelling makes the hero's tragic stature prophetic: when he dies his people wait for the disaster that will descend on them. However, loving one's enemies was not part of the feudal code.

It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us,
living in this world
means waiting for our end.
Let whoever can
win glory before death.
When a warrior is gone,
That will be his best and only bulwark.
(from Beowulf, 1999)

For further reading: Passage to the Centre by Daniel Tobin (1999); Seamus Heaney by Helen Hennessy Vendler (1998); Critical Essays on Seamus Heaney, ed. by Robert F. Garratt (1995); The Art of Seamus Heaney, ed. by T. Curtis (1994); Seamus Heaney: Poet and Critic by Arthur E. McGuinness (1994); Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet by Michael Parker (1993); Seamus Heaney, ed. by H. Bloom (1993)

ELEVEN POEMS, (1965)