Seamus Heaney

Based on Wikipedia: Seamus Heaney

The Poet Who Walked on Air

When Seamus Heaney died in August 2013, his final text message to his wife Marie was in Latin: "Noli timere"—don't be afraid. It was a fitting farewell from a man who spent his life translating between worlds: between languages, between the ancient and modern, between the rural Ireland of his childhood and the literary heights of Harvard and Oxford.

His gravestone in Bellaghy, Northern Ireland, bears a different kind of message: "Walk on air against your better judgement." The line comes from his own poem "The Gravel Walks," and it captures something essential about Heaney himself. Here was a man who, against all practical reasoning, believed in the power of poetry to matter—and proved himself right.

At the time of his death, The Independent called him "probably the best-known poet in the world." The American poet Robert Lowell had already declared him "the most important Irish poet since Yeats." These are extraordinary claims for any writer, but especially for one who grew up on a small farm in County Londonderry, the eldest of nine children, in a place called Mossbawn—a name that sounds like it belongs in a poem, which of course it eventually did.

A Childhood Between Two Worlds

Seamus Justin Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, into a household defined by a productive tension. His father Patrick was a farmer and cattle dealer, a man rooted in the Gaelic agricultural traditions that had shaped rural Ireland for centuries. His mother Margaret came from a family that worked at a local linen mill—representatives of the industrialized Ulster that was pulling Ireland into the modern age.

Heaney later remarked on this inner tension, the way his parents embodied two different Irelands. It would become one of the great themes of his work: the negotiation between past and present, between earth and industry, between staying rooted and moving forward.

The family farmhouse was modest but not impoverished. Patrick Heaney had been orphaned young and raised by uncles who introduced him to cattle dealing, a trade that required both agricultural knowledge and commercial shrewdness. Margaret was one of those capable Irish mothers who managed to raise nine children while maintaining the complex social and domestic machinery of a farm household.

When Seamus was fourteen, the family moved a few miles away to Bellaghy, which would become the permanent family home. But before that move, when he was just twelve, he won a scholarship to St. Columb's College, a Roman Catholic boarding school in Derry. It was a crucial turning point—the moment when a bright farm boy began his journey toward becoming one of the century's great literary voices.

The Weight of Early Loss

Shortly after young Seamus arrived at St. Columb's, tragedy struck. In February 1953, his younger brother Christopher was killed in a road accident. He was only four years old.

Decades later, Heaney would write about this loss in "Mid-Term Break," one of his most devastating poems. The title itself carries a terrible irony—a mid-term break usually means a holiday, a respite from school. Instead, the teenage Heaney sat alone in the college sick bay, waiting to be driven home for a funeral. The poem ends with the young boy in his coffin, "a four-foot box, a foot for every year."

He returned to his brother's death again in "The Blackbird of Glanmore," written much later in life. This is one of the remarkable things about Heaney's work—the way certain experiences became touchstones he returned to across decades, finding new meaning each time, like a farmer turning the same soil and discovering different things with each pass of the plow.

Finding His Voice

At Queen's University Belfast, where Heaney enrolled in 1957 to study English Language and Literature, something clicked. He found a copy of Ted Hughes's poetry collection Lupercal, and it was like a door opening.

"Suddenly, the matter of contemporary poetry was the material of my own life," he later explained.

This might sound obvious—of course poets write about their own lives—but it was genuinely revelatory for Heaney. Hughes wrote about animals, about rural England, about the physical world with a kind of fierce attention that seemed to give permission for Heaney to write about the ditches and farms of County Derry. Poetry didn't have to be about Greek myths or London drawing rooms. It could be about a blacksmith's forge or digging potatoes.

Heaney graduated in 1961 with First Class Honours—the highest distinction possible—and moved on to teacher training at St. Joseph's College. His headmaster at his first teaching job, St. Thomas' Secondary School in Ballymurphy, Belfast, was a writer named Michael McLaverty from County Monaghan. McLaverty became something like a foster father to the young poet, introducing him to the work of Patrick Kavanagh, another Irish poet who wrote about ordinary rural life with extraordinary attention.

Under McLaverty's mentorship, Heaney began publishing poetry in 1962. The older writer's influence was profound enough that Heaney later dedicated a poem called "Fosterage" to him.

The Belfast Group

In 1963, Heaney joined a poets' workshop organized by Philip Hobsbaum, an English lecturer at Queen's University. This was the Belfast Group, and it would prove to be one of those remarkable gatherings that literary history occasionally produces—a constellation of talents that push each other toward greatness.

Through the Belfast Group, Heaney met Derek Mahon and Michael Longley, two other poets who would go on to distinguished careers. There's something about the workshop environment, the regular meetings, the obligation to produce new work and subject it to criticism, that can be transformative for a young writer. It creates accountability and community in what is otherwise a solitary profession.

The same year, while teaching at St. Joseph's, Heaney met Marie Devlin, a native of Ardboe, County Tyrone. They married in August 1965 and would have three children together: Michael (born 1966), Christopher (born 1968), and Catherine Ann (born 1973). Marie was herself a school teacher and writer, eventually publishing Over Nine Waves, a collection of traditional Irish myths and legends.

Death of a Naturalist

Heaney's first major collection arrived in 1966. He had initially tried to place it with Dolmen Press in Dublin, but while waiting to hear back, he was signed by Faber and Faber—one of the most prestigious poetry publishers in the English-speaking world, the house of T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. Faber would remain his publisher for the rest of his life.

The collection was called Death of a Naturalist, and its title poem describes a childhood experience with frogs that moves from wonder to something like horror. The young speaker is fascinated by frogspawn in the school nature table, enchanted by the tadpoles and the idea of transformation. Then he visits the flax-dam where the frogs breed and is suddenly overwhelmed by the reality—the "angry" croaking, the "slap and plop" of their bodies, the way they seem to threaten vengeance for all the spawn he's stolen.

It's a perfect metaphor for the loss of innocence, the moment when nature stops being a charming subject for study and becomes something wild and alien. The title "Death of a Naturalist" works on multiple levels: the frogs end the child's innocent observation, but the poem itself shows a mature poet being born from that moment of crisis.

The collection won several awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Prize, and established Heaney as a major new voice. That same year, he was appointed lecturer in Modern English Literature at Queen's University Belfast. He was twenty-seven years old.

The Troubles and the Move South

The late 1960s brought upheaval to Northern Ireland. The Troubles—three decades of conflict between unionists who wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom and nationalists who wanted unification with the Republic of Ireland—began in earnest around 1968 and would claim over 3,500 lives before the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

Heaney was a Catholic from a nationalist background, but he was also a poet who resisted being reduced to a political spokesman. His work engaged with the violence and divisions of his homeland, but always obliquely, through metaphor and historical parallels. In his 1975 collection North, he drew on archaeological discoveries of preserved "bog bodies"—Iron Age murder victims whose remains had been preserved for millennia in the peat bogs of Northern Europe—as a way of thinking about ritual violence and sacrifice.

In 1972, Heaney made a decisive break. He left his lectureship in Belfast and moved south to Wicklow, in the Republic of Ireland, to write full-time. Born and educated in Northern Ireland, he nevertheless stressed that he was Irish, not British—a distinction that mattered enormously in the context of the Troubles.

His third collection, Wintering Out, was published that year. In 1975 came North, which confronted the violence more directly than anything he had written before. The same year saw a pamphlet of prose poems called Stations—Heaney was prolific, continually finding new forms for his investigations.

In 1976, he was appointed Head of English at Carysfort College in Dublin, and the family moved to Sandymount, a coastal suburb of the city. Sandymount would remain his home base for the rest of his life, though his commitments would take him increasingly across the Atlantic.

Harvard, Oxford, and the World

In 1981, Heaney began what would become a long relationship with Harvard University, first as a visiting professor. He was affiliated with Adams House, one of Harvard's twelve undergraduate residential houses. By 1985, he had become a tenured faculty member, holding the impressively titled Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory, a position that had previously been held by John Quincy Adams before he became president.

From 1998 to 2006, he was Harvard's Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence—another title that linked him to the great American literary tradition even as he remained thoroughly Irish in his concerns and sensibility.

Then, in 1989, he was elected Oxford Professor of Poetry, a position he held until 1994. The Oxford chair is unusual—it doesn't require the holder to live in Oxford, just to give a certain number of lectures during their five-year term. This arrangement suited Heaney perfectly. He could divide his time between Dublin, Cambridge (Massachusetts), and occasional visits to Oxford without being tied to any single institution.

His public readings during this period became legendary. The audiences were so large and so enthusiastic that those who queued for tickets were sometimes dubbed "Heaneyboppers"—a play on "teenybopper," suggesting an almost rock-star level of fandom. For a poet. In the late twentieth century. It was remarkable.

Loss and Clearances

The 1980s brought personal losses that shaped Heaney's work as deeply as any literary influence. His mother Margaret died in autumn 1984. Three years later, he published "Clearances," a sequence of eight sonnets dedicated to her memory.

The title works in multiple ways. A clearance can be a space that's been emptied out, like the hole left by loss. It can also refer to the sad process of sorting through a dead person's possessions. And there's a darker historical resonance for an Irish writer—the Highland and Irish clearances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when landlords evicted tenant farmers to make way for more profitable land uses.

In October 1986, just two years after his mother, his father Patrick died. The loss of both parents within such a short time affected Heaney deeply, and he expressed his grief across multiple poems. "The Stone Verdict," "The Haw Lantern," and other works from this period carry the weight of that double bereavement.

The Nobel Prize

In 1995, Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

He was on holiday in Greece with Marie when the Swedish Academy made their announcement. Neither journalists nor his own children could reach him until he arrived at Dublin Airport two days later—though an Irish television crew somehow tracked him to Kalamata.

Asked how he felt to have his name added to the Irish Nobel pantheon of W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and Samuel Beckett, Heaney responded with characteristic modesty: "It's like being a little foothill at the bottom of a mountain range. You hope you just live up to it. It's extraordinary."

From the airport, he and Marie were taken directly to Áras an Uachtaráin—the official residence of the President of Ireland—for champagne with President Mary Robinson. In personal conversations afterward, Heaney would refer to the prize discreetly as "the N thing," as if naming it directly might seem like boasting.

Translation and Transformation

Alongside his original poetry, Heaney pursued a parallel career as a translator, bringing ancient and medieval texts into contemporary English. His 1990 play The Cure at Troy was based on Sophocles's Philoctetes, a Greek tragedy about a hero abandoned on a desert island because of a wound that won't heal.

But his most celebrated translation came in 1999: a new verse translation of Beowulf, the Old English epic poem about a Scandinavian warrior who battles monsters. The poem had been translated many times before, but Heaney's version brought something new—a feeling for the original's physicality and strangeness that came, perhaps, from his own background in a world of farms and physical labor.

The Beowulf translation won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, making Heaney one of the few poets to win that prize twice (his 1996 collection The Spirit Level had won three years earlier). It also introduced Beowulf to a whole new audience, becoming a bestseller and a standard teaching text.

Eminem and the Voltage of Language

In 2003, an interviewer asked Heaney if there was any figure in popular culture who aroused interest in poetry and lyrics. His answer surprised many: he praised American rapper Eminem from Detroit.

"He has created a sense of what is possible," Heaney said. "He has sent a voltage around a generation. He has done this not just through his subversive attitude but also his verbal energy."

Coming from a Nobel laureate known for elegiac poems about bog bodies and his father's spade, this endorsement seemed incongruous. But it revealed something important about Heaney's understanding of what poetry is: concentrated language that carries an electric charge. Whether that charge came from Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse or Detroit hip-hop mattered less than whether it could jolt people into attention.

The Stroke and Human Chain

In August 2006, Heaney had a stroke. He recovered well enough to joke, when fitted with a heart monitor, "Blessed are the pacemakers"—a wry biblical allusion that was pure Heaney. But he cancelled all public engagements for several months and was forced to confront his own mortality in a new way.

Among his visitors during his recovery was former President Bill Clinton, an indication of how far beyond the literary world Heaney's reputation had spread.

Four years later, Faber published Human Chain, Heaney's twelfth collection. It was inspired in part by the stroke, which had left him, as he described it, "babyish" and "on the brink." The book won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection—one of the major poetry prizes Heaney had never previously won, despite having been shortlisted twice before.

The poet Ruth Padel, one of the Forward judges, described the work as "a collection of painful, honest and delicately weighted poems... a wonderful and humane achievement." The writer Colm Tóibín called it "his best single volume for many years"—a remarkable assessment for a book published forty-four years after the poet's first.

The Seamus Heaney Centre

In 2003, Queen's University Belfast—where Heaney had studied as an undergraduate and taught as a young lecturer—opened the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. It houses the Heaney Media Archive, a record of his entire body of work along with a full catalogue of his radio and television appearances.

That same year, Heaney decided to lodge a substantial portion of his literary archive at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. It was intended as a memorial to William M. Chace, the university's recently retired president. The Emory papers represented the largest repository of Heaney's work from 1964 to 2003, joining an impressive collection of material from other Irish writers including Yeats, Paul Muldoon, and Heaney's old Belfast Group colleagues Ciaran Carson and Michael Longley.

Honors Upon Honors

The honors accumulated throughout Heaney's career until listing them becomes almost absurd. He received the Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France in 1996. He was elected to the Royal Irish Academy and named a Saoi of Aosdána—the highest honor that organization can bestow, limited to only five living members at any time.

Aosdána itself is worth explaining. Established in 1981 by the Irish government, it's an organization of artists who have made outstanding contributions to the arts in Ireland. Members receive an annual stipend called a "cnuas" (the Irish word for "nut harvest" or "gathering"), allowing them to focus on creative work. Being elected a Saoi—the word means "wise one" or "sage" in Irish—is recognition beyond ordinary membership.

Honorary doctorates came from Queen's University, Fordham, Bates College, the University of Pennsylvania, Rhodes University, and many others. At Fordham's 1982 commencement, Heaney delivered his address as a forty-six-stanza poem entitled "Verses for a Fordham Commencement"—because when you're Seamus Heaney, why wouldn't you?

In 2009, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature, considered Britain's most important literary award for lifetime achievement. To mark his seventieth birthday that year, he recorded a spoken-word album over twelve hours long, reading through his poetry collections. It's an extraordinary document—the poet's own voice giving definitive readings of work that had previously existed only on the page.

A Street in Denmark

One of the stranger honors came in 2008, when Heaney became artist of honor in Østermarie, Denmark, and had a street named after him: Seamus Heaney Stræde. It's a small recognition in a small town in a country far from Ireland, but it captures something about how widely his work had traveled.

Danish readers would have known his bog poems, which drew on archaeological discoveries from their own country—preserved bodies like Tollund Man and Grauballe Man, pulled from the peat after two thousand years, their faces still eerily recognizable. Heaney had used these figures to think about violence and sacrifice in ways that transcended any single national context. No wonder the Danes wanted to claim him, a little, as their own.

The Final Message

Seamus Heaney died on August 30, 2013, at the age of seventy-four. His final communication was that text message to Marie: "Noli timere."

The Latin phrase comes from the Vulgate Bible, appearing multiple times when angels or divine figures tell frightened mortals not to be afraid. For a poet who had spent his life translating between languages and between past and present, it was an appropriate final word—ancient wisdom transmitted through modern technology, comfort offered in the face of the ultimate transition.

He is buried at St. Mary's Church in Bellaghy, the town where his family moved when he was a boy, the place that became home even as his reputation carried him across the world. The epitaph on his gravestone—"Walk on air against your better judgement"—comes from "The Gravel Walks," a poem about the hard paths that work creates and the moments of inexplicable lightness that make such work bearable.

It's advice he clearly took himself. Against all practical judgement, Seamus Heaney chose to be a poet in an age when poetry was supposed to be dying, found a massive audience in an era of declining attention spans, and won the world's highest literary honor by writing about frogs, farm equipment, and bog bodies. He walked on air. The rest of us are still looking up.