Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, who has died aged 74, was described by Robert Lowell as “the most important Irish poet since Yeats”.
Widely acclaimed for his many notable achievements, during his lifetime he undoubtedly was the most popular poet writing in English, and the only poet assured of a place in the bestseller lists. His books sold, and continue to sell, in the tens of thousands, while hordes of “Heaneyboppers” flocked to his readings.
His earliest influences, Robert Frost and Ted Hughes, are reflected throughout his work, but most especially in his first two collections, where he recollected images of his childhood on the family farm in county Derry.
Other poets, especially Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Hardy, as well as Dante, influenced his work.
Heaney did not confine himself to poetry. A respected critic, he also was a distinguished academic and his translations from Greek, Latin, Italian, Irish and Anglo-Saxon reflect the extent of his learning. As a translator he sought to remain true to the original text, and disliked the modern practice whereby a poem is “smashed and grabbed rather than rendered up”.
As well as translations from Dante in various volumes, and versions from the Polish of Jan Kochanowski, published as Laments (1995), he published Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish (1983). His translation of Beowulf (1999) won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 2000. The Cure at Troy, based on Sophocles’ Philoctetes, was first performed at the Guildhall, Derry, in 1990, while Burial at Thebes, his version of Sophocles’ Antigone, was premiered at the Abbey theatre in 2004.
His translation of the late medieval Scottish poet Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables was published in 2009.
Henryson wrote in Lowland Scots, prompting Heaney to explore another strand of the Northern tradition.
A sometime broadcaster and journalist, in the 1970s Heaney presented the book programme Imprint on RTÉ radio. He recorded several albums for Claddagh records, collaborating with fellow poet John Montague on one and uileann piper Liam O’Flynn on another. RTÉ in 2009 produced a 15-CD box set of him reading his 11 poetry collections. Conferred with numerous honorary doctorates, he also was a member and saoi of Aosdána, and an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 2004 the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry was opened at Queen’s University Belfast and in 2010 launched an annual poetry award. His District and Circle was in 2006 awarded the TS Eliot Prize.
When in March 2009 he was presented with the David Cohen Prize for Literature the then British poet laureate Andrew Motion said that Heaney’s poems “crystallised the story of our times in language which has bravely and memorably continued to extend its imaginative reach”.
In 2011 Heaney was conferred with an honorary doctorate of philosophy by Dublin City University, the highest award the college can confer, and awarded the Ulysses Medal, UCD’s highest honour. He also received the inaugural Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award in honour of his contribution to Irish literature. He was not without his detractors, however. The polemicist Desmond Fennell characterised him as a creature of the Anglo-American literary establishment. And the scholar and critic Antony Easthope wrote: “The consensus for Heaney has endorsed a poetry which is bland, self-important and simply not very original.”
Born in 1939, Seamus Justin Heaney was the eldest of nine children of Patrick Heaney and his wife Margaret (née McCann), and was brought up on the family farm, Mossbawn, between Toomebridge and Castledawson in Co. Derry. In 1954 the family moved to The Wood, outside Bellaghy, a farm bequeathed to Patrick Heaney by his uncle, Hugh Scullion. Educated at the local Anahorish primary school, he later won scholarships to St. Columb’s College, Derry, and Queen’s University, Belfast.
His brother Christopher was killed in a road accident at the age of four while Heaney was studying at St Columb’s. The poems “Mid-Term Break” and “The Blackbird of Glanmore” refer to Christopher’s death.
After graduating, he taught briefly at St Thomas’s intermediate school in Belfast – where the headmaster Michael MacLaverty encouraged his writing – before taking up a post as a lecturer in English at St Joseph’s teacher training college in Belfast in 1963; in 1966 he was appointed as a lecturer in modern English literature at Queen’s.
His award of the Nobel prize in 1995 was greeted by a remarkable degree of consensus. The Nobel Prize for Literature is often contentious but no award was more widely welcomed and warmly applauded than that made to Heaney (the sour note struck by Eamon Dunphy in the Sunday Independent – “This man deserves real begrudgery” – was one of the few exceptions).