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Seamus Heaney, Irish Poet of Soil and Strife, Dies at 74 Seamus Heaney, Irish Poet of Soil and Strife, Dies at 74
(35 minutes later)
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. Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel laureate in Literature who was often described as the greatest Irish poet since Yeats, died on Friday in Dublin. 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. His publisher, Faber & Faber, announced the death. The apparent cause was complications of a stroke Mr. Heaney suffered in 2006.
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.” The Irish Prime Minister, Enda Kenny, said the nation was in a deep mourning that only the poet himself could describe. "For us, Seamus Heaney was the keeper of our language, our codes, our essence as a people," she told The Irish Times. 
“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: A native of Northern Ireland, Mr. Heaney, a Roman Catholic, was renowned for work that powerfully evoked the beauty and blood that together have come to define the modern Irish condition. The author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, as well as critical essays and works for the stage, he repeatedly explored the strife and moral quandaries that have plagued his homeland, while managing simultaneously to steer clear of polemic.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Mr. Heaney’s poetry had a primeval, epiphanic quality and was often suffused with references to ancient myths — Celtic, of course, but also those of ancient Greece. His style, linguistically pyrotechnic, was at the same time conspicuously lacking in the obscurity that can attend poetic pyrotechnics.
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge At its best, his work had both a meditative lyricism and an airy velocity. His lines might carry a boggy melancholy, but they also, as often as not, communicated the wild onrushing joy of being alive.
Through living roots awaken in my head. “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 a personal manifesto:
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Between my finger and my thumb Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
The squat pen rests. Through living roots awaken in my head.
I’ll dig with it. But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
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.” Between my finger and my thumb
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. The squat pen rests.
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.” I’ll dig with it.
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.” 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.
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. In his hands, that language was plain and clear, often dazzling, with images of bogs and rocks and streams, as well as epiphanies of the soul. For Mr. Heaney, nature provided settings for moral problems, and through them he seemed to reach agnostics and believing Catholics alike.
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. After he gained fame with “Death of a Naturalist,” Mr. Heaney never eased his pace. Publishing more than a dozen major collections between 1966 and 2010 — his later volumes include “The Spirit Level,” “District and Circle” and “Bog Poems” — he became acknowledged as a major literary voice of the 20th century. Robert Lowell, for one, called him the “most important Irish poet since Yeats.”
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 also wrote two plays, four works on the process of poetry and a well-regarded translation of “Beowulf.” He won dozens of accolades, among them the French Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1996 and the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2006.
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. Mr. Heaney was that rarity among modern poets: not only critically praised but also widely read. Millions of readers bought his books, finding his verse eminently accessible, with its familiar images and universal thoughts.
The accessibility of his work helped. It had references to Greek and Celtic legend, but was usually clear, often dazzling with images of nature, epiphanies of the soul. He wrote about bogs and rocks and streams and transformed them into the settings for the moral problems in a way that seemed to reach not only agnostic intellectuals, but also believing Catholics. In a 1984 poem, “Old Smoothing Iron,” for example, about a woman ironing a sheet, he expressed a kind of hardened optimism about life:
The Irish Times said in an editorial after he won the Nobel Prize: “Book sales may not mean much in the areas of fiction or biography, but for a poet to sell in the thousands is remarkable proof to his ability to speak in his poems to what are inadequately called ‘ordinary people.’ Yet the popularity of his work should not be allowed to obscure the fact that this is deep, at times profound poetry, forged through hard thinking and an attentive, always tender openness to the world, especially the natural world.” To work, her dumb lunge says,
Writing in a collection of his lectures in 1995, “The Redress of Poetry, Mr. Heaney said: “It is in the space between the farmhouse and the playhouse that one discovers what I’ve called ‘the frontier of writing,’ the line that divides the actual conditions of our daily lives from the imaginative representations of those conditions in literature.” is to move a certain mass
In the 1984 collection, “Station Island,” he wrote: “The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night, dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest.” through a certain distance,
He is survived by his wife, Marie, and his children, Christopher, Michael and Catherine Ann. is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
By some estimates, no other living poet was read so widely in recent decades.
“Book sales may not mean much in the areas of fiction or biography, but for a poet to sell in the thousands is remarkable proof to his ability to speak in his poems to what are inadequately called ‘ordinary people,’ “ The Irish Times wrote in an editorial after Mr. Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize. “Yet the popularity of his work should not be allowed to obscure the fact that this deep, at times profound poetry, forged through hard thinking and an attentive, always tender openness to the world, especially the natural world.”
Seamus Justin Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, on a farm called Mossbawn in County Derry in the western part of the British province of Northern Ireland. He was the eldest of nine children.
He recalled his father, Patrick, a cattle dealer and farmer, as a dour man suspicious of verbiage. His mother, the former Margaret Kathleen McCann, also had little interest in literature, but, as 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, Mr. Heaney watched police and public officials of the predominantly Protestant province treat Catholics with disdain, sometimes with cruelty. One of his biographers, Michael Parker, wrote, “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.”
Seamus 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. His brother Christopher was killed in a road accident at the age of four while Mr. Heaney was studying at the school, and the later poems “Mid-Term Break” and “The Blackbird of Glanmore” refer to the death. 
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 in Belfast and later at Carysfort College, a teacher training college near Dublin. Then, in 1972, one of the most deadly years in Northern Island’s conflict, he gave up full-time academic work to be a freelance writer, publishing the collection "Wintering Out." 
He began wrestling with the evils of Ulster’s sectarian strife and discrimination in his next collection, capturing the uneasiness of daily life in a divided society in poems such as "Whatever You Say Say Nothing" and "Funeral Rites." 
For much of his career, Mr. Heaney was under pressure to write favorably about the goals of his fellow Catholics, many of whom wanted a Northern Ireland free of British control. But while 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. Though he resented British oppression in Northern Ireland, he said, he admired much in British culture and English literature.
And he was wary of extreme positions. As a young man, Mr. Heaney said, he felt excited by the rise the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the outlawed group using violence to end Northern Ireland’s union with Britain. Later, his views changed.
"There was a sense of an utterly wasteful, cancerous stalemate, and that the violence was unproductive," he said in 2009.  "It was villainous, but you were living with it.  Only after it stopped did you realize what you had lived with."
Following his Nobel Prize, Mr. Heaney became a frequent lecturer at universities around the world and often conducted public readings in his resonant baritone voice.  But he scaled back public commitments after he suffered a stroke in 2006. 
Mr. Heaney is survived by his wife, Marie, and his children, Christopher, Michael and Catherine Ann.
The critic Richard Eder, writing in The Los Angeles Times, saw Mr. Heaney as something of a public poet, a bard who sprang from the farms and streets of his native country and who could speak directly to those who lived there with him.
“Art as the wizardry of style, on the one hand, and art as personal and public expression, on the other,” Mr. Eder wrote. “Not many can fuse the two nowadays, and no one writing in English does it so well as Heaney. He employs poetry’s power to tell truth, and the artist’s power to make us know that it is a truth we need.”
But for Mr. Heaney, poetry was ultimately not a political act, or an obligation. In the 1984 poetry collection, “Station Island,” he wrote:
The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night
dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest.”