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Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 in County Derry in Ireland. He is the eldest of nine children and grew up in the countryside of Mossburn. When he was 12 Heaney went to boarding school at St Columb's in Derry. He went to Queen's University in Belfast and studied English. Heaney became a teacher and a lecturer at Queen's University. In 1995 Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Heaney is one of the most widely read poets of our time. In his poetry Seamus Heaney draws strongly on his Irish background. His poetry often deals with his surroundings in Ireland, particularly in Northern Ireland, where he was born. Heaney's poetry is not often overtly political or militant, and is far more concerned with profound observations of the small details of the everyday. There is a humaneness and a decency to his work. Some of his work is concerned with the lessons of history and indeed prehistory and the very ancient. Other works concern his personal family history, focusing on characters in his family. In the poems we will study Heaney paints vivid, sensuous descriptions of his childhood memories of rural, Irish life. Seamus Heaney is a universal poet and a much admired one. Robert Lowell called him "the most important Irish poet since Yeats."

When studying Heaney, it must be remembered, that he is first and foremost a poet: he is “in love with words themselves” (//Preoccupations//, p. 45) and takes delight in “summoning the energies of words” (//Preoccupations//, p. 36) and sees his poetry as “self delighting buds on the old bough of tradition” (//Preoccupations//, p. 134). From these utterances it would appear that Heaney is valuing the intrinsic meaning of poetry as ‘art for art’s sake’ rather than art as an agent for political change. He does, however, recognise the unavoidable inevitability of writing within a particular cultural and wider political context. Heaney sought to explain the political nature of his poetry in an interview: Poetry is born out of the watermarks and colourings of the self. But that self in some ways takes its spiritual pulse from the inward spiritual structuring of the community to which it belongs: and the community to which I belong is Catholic and Nationalist. I believe that the poet’s force now, and hopefully in the future, is to maintain the efficacy of his “mythos”, his own cultural and political colourings, rather than to serve any particular momentary strategy and his political leaders, his para-military organisation or his own liberal self might want him to serve. I think that poetry and politics are, in different ways, an articulation, an ordering, a giving form to inchoate pieties, prejudices, world-views, or whatever. And I think that my own poetry is a kind of slow, obstinate, papish burn, emanating from the ground I was brought up on. (Interview with Seamus Deane, “Unhappy and at Home”, in //The Crane Bag//, No. 1, 1977.)