Seamus Justin Heaney

Seamus Justin Heaney
(1939)

Irish poet whose work is notable for its evocation of events in Irish history and its allusions to Irish myth. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.
After graduating from Queen's University, Belfast (B.A., 1961), Heaney taught secondary school for a year and then lectured in colleges and universities in Belfast and Dublin. In 1982 he joined the faculty of Harvard University as visiting professor and, in 1985, became full professor--a post he retained while teaching at the University of Oxford (1989-94).

Heaney's first poetry collection was the prizewinning Death of a Naturalist (1966). In this book and Door into the Dark (1969), he wrote in a traditional style about a passing way of life--that of domestic rural life in Northern Ireland. In Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975), he began to encompass such subjects as the violence in Northern Ireland and contemporary Irish experience, though he continued to view his subjects through a mythic and mystical filter. Among the later volumes that reflect Heaney's honed and deceptively simple style are Field Work (1979), Station Island (1984), The Haw Lantern (1987), and Seeing Things (1991). His Selected Poems, 1966-1987 also was published in 1991. The Spirit Level (1996) concerns the notion of centredness and balance in both the natural and the spiritual senses.

Heaney also wrote essays on poetry and poets, including such figures as William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robert Lowell. Some of these essays appeared in Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978 (1980). A collection of his lectures at Oxford was published as The Redress of Poetry (1995). The Cure at Troy (1991) is Heaney's version of Sophocles' Philoctetes, and a later volume, The Midnight Verdict (1993), contains translations of selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses and from Cuirt an mheadhon oidhche (The Midnight Court), a work by the 18th-century Irish writer Brian Merriman.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Studies of Heaney's life and work are Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney (1993), on his earlier career; and Thomas C. Foster, Seamus Heaney (1989). Analyses of his writings include Henry Hart, Seamus Heaney: Poet of Contrary Progressions (1992); Elmer Andrews (ed.), Seamus Heaney (1992); Tony Curtis (ed.), The Art of Seamus Heaney, 3rd rev. ed. (1994); and Michael R. Molino, Questioning Tradition, Language, and Myth: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1994).