Heaney, Seamus << HEE nee, SHAY muhs >> (1939-2013), an Irish poet, won the 1995 Nobel Prize in literature. His poetry showed a powerful devotion to the earth, particularly to the landscape and soil of his native Northern Ireland. But Heaney was equally dedicated to language. He made the words of his poems assume the qualities he found in the physical world. Heaney’s writing is full of taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing.
Many of Heaney’s poems portray the intimate details of the Irish countryside and its trees, fields, and bogs. Some of his poems describe ancient corpses discovered in peat bogs, preserved by chemicals in the soil. For Heaney, these figures symbolize the power of the Irish land to preserve the memories and traditions of its people. Several of his poems draw upon ancient Irish legends about a hero named Sweeney, who has been preserved for centuries in the Irish imagination.
Heaney’s poetry also expressed his deep concern with the political turmoil and violence in Northern Ireland. Many of his poems deal with the conflict between the Irish Republican Army and the United Kingdom over Irish independence. Heaney believed that a poet must keep a distance from politics, refusing to take sides. He believed his task was to record as forcefully as he could the conflict’s effects on individuals, especially the suffering and moral confusion it caused them.
Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, on a farm in County Derry, Northern Ireland. He selected poems from 10 books of his poetry for the collection Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (1998). His poems also appeared in the later collections Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006), and Human Chain (2010). After his death on Aug. 30, 2013, members of Heaney’s family compiled and published 100 Poems (2019), a brief collection intended to illustrate the full sweep of Heaney’s career as a poet.
Heaney’s lectures on poetry were published in The Redress of Poetry (1995). In 1999, Heaney completed an award-winning translation of the medieval English epic poem Beowulf. Heaney also translated two tragedies by the ancient Greek dramatist Sophocles, The Cure at Troy (1990), based on Philoctetes, and The Burial at Thebes (2004), based on Antigone. Heaney’s translation of Book VI of the Aeneid, an epic by the Roman poet Virgil, was published in 2016, after Heaney’s death. All of Heaney’s translations, including those of poems in such languages as Czech, French, German, Romanian, Scottish Gaelic, and Spanish, were published in one volume as The Translations of Seamus Heaney (2022).
