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Seamus Heaney, Irish Poet of Soil and Strife, Dies at 74 Seamus Heaney, Irish Poet of Soil and Strife, Dies at 74
(about 1 hour later)
Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel laureate in Literature who has often been described as the greatest Irish poet since Yeats, died on Friday in Dublin. He was 74. Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel laureate in Literature, who was often called the greatest Irish poet since Yeats, died on Friday in Dublin. He was 74.
His publisher, Faber & Faber, announced the death. The apparent cause was complications of a stroke Mr. Heaney suffered in 2006. His publisher, Faber & Faber, announced the death. The Irish poet Paul Muldoon, a longtime friend, said that Mr. Heaney was hospitalized after a fall on Thursday. Mr. Heaney had suffered a stroke in 2006.
The Irish Prime Minister, Enda Kenny, said the nation was in a deep mourning that only the poet himself could describe. “For us, Seamus Heaney was the keeper of our language, our codes, our essence as a people,” he told The Irish Times. In an address, President Michael D. Higgins of Ireland, himself a poet, praised Mr. Heaney’s “contribution to the republics of letters, conscience and humanity.” Enda Kenny, the Irish prime minister, said that Mr. Heaney’s death had brought “great sorrow to Ireland, to language and to literature.”
A native of Northern Ireland, Mr. Heaney, a Roman Catholic, was renowned for work that powerfully evoked the beauty and blood that together have come to define the modern Irish condition. The author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, as well as critical essays and works for the stage, he repeatedly explored the strife and moral quandaries that have plagued his homeland, while managing simultaneously to steer clear of polemic. A Roman Catholic native of Northern Ireland, Mr. Heaney was renowned for work that powerfully evoked the beauty and blood that together have come to define the modern Irish condition. The author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, as well as critical essays and works for the stage, he repeatedly explored the strife and uncertainties that have afflicted his homeland, while managing simultaneously to steer clear of polemic.
Mr. Heaney’s poetry had a primeval, epiphanic quality and was often suffused with references to myths — Celtic, of course, but also those of ancient Greece. His style, linguistically pyrotechnic, was at the same time conspicuously lacking in the obscurity that can attend poetic pyrotechnics. Mr. Heaney (pronounced HEE-nee), who had made his home in Dublin since the 1970s, was known to a wide public for the profuse white hair and stentorian voice that befit his calling. He held lectureships at some of the world’s foremost universities, including Harvard, where, starting in the 1980s, he taught regularly for many years; Oxford; and the University of California, Berkeley.
At its best, his work had both a meditative lyricism and an airy velocity. His lines might carry a boggy melancholy, but they also, as often as not, communicated the wild onrushing joy of being alive. As the trade magazine Publishers Weekly observed in 1995, Mr. Heaney “has an aura, if not a star power, shared by few contemporary poets, emanating as much from his leonine features and unpompous sense of civic responsibility as from the immediate accessibility of his lines.”
“Digging,” the first poem in his first collection, “The Death of a Naturalist,” described his father digging potatoes and his grandfather digging turf. The last lines seemed to set down a personal manifesto: Throughout his work, Mr. Heaney was consumed with morality. In his hands, a peat bog is not merely an emblematic feature of the Irish landscape; it is also a spiritual quagmire, evoking the deep ethical conundrums that have long pervaded the place.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap “Yeats, despite being quite well known, despite his public role, actually didn’t have anything like the celebrity or, frankly, the ability to touch the people in the way that Seamus did,” Mr. Muldoon, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the poetry editor at The New Yorker, said in an interview on Friday. “It was almost like he was indistinguishable from the country. He was like a rock star who also happened to be a poet.”
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Mr. Heaney was enraptured, as he once put it, by “words as bearers of history and mystery.” His poetry, which had an epiphanic quality, was suffused with references to pre-Christian myth — Celtic, of course, but also that of ancient Greece. His style, linguistically dazzling, was nonetheless lacking in the obscurity that can attend poetic pyrotechnics.
Through living roots awaken in my head. At its best, Mr. Heaney’s work had both a meditative lyricism and an airy velocity. His lines could embody a dark marshy melancholy, but as often as not they also communicated the wild onrushing joy of being alive.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. The result — work that was finely wrought yet notably straightforward — made Mr. Heaney one of the most widely read poets in the world.
Between my finger and my thumb Reviewing Mr. Heaney’s collection “North” in The New York Review of Books in 1976, the Irish poet Richard Murphy wrote: “His original power, which even the sternest critics bow to with respect, is that he can give you the feeling as you read his poems that you are actually doing what they describe. His words not only mean what they say, they sound like their meaning.”
The squat pen rests. Mr. Heaney made his reputation with his debut volume, “Death of a Naturalist,” published in 1966. In “Digging,” a poem from the collection, he explored the earthy roots of his art:
I’ll dig with it. Between my finger and my thumb
And dig he did, producing a remarkable range of work: love poems, epic poems, poems about conflict and strife, odes to nature, poems addressed to friends, poems for the dead, poems that simply reveled in the sound of the English language. The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
In his hands, that language was plain and clear, often dazzling, with images of bogs and rocks and streams, as well as epiphanies of the soul. For Mr. Heaney, nature provided settings for moral problems, and through them he seemed to reach agnostics and Catholic believers alike. Under my window, a clean rasping sound
After he gained fame with “Death of a Naturalist,” Mr. Heaney never eased his pace. Publishing more than a dozen major collections between 1966 and 2010 — his later volumes include “The Spirit Level,” “District and Circle” and “Bog Poems” — he became acknowledged as a major literary voice of the 20th century. Robert Lowell, for one, called him the “most important Irish poet since Yeats.” When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
He also wrote two plays, four works on the process of poetry and a well-regarded translation of “Beowulf.” He won dozens of accolades, among them the French Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1996 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2006. My father, digging. I look down
Mr. Heaney was that rarity among modern poets: not only critically praised but also widely read. Millions of readers bought his books, finding his verse eminently accessible, with its familiar images and universal thoughts. Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
In a 1984 poem, “Old Smoothing Iron,” for example, about a woman ironing a sheet, he expressed a kind of hardened optimism about life: Bends low, comes up twenty years away
To work, her dumb lunge says, Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
is to move a certain mass Where he was digging.
through a certain distance, The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
is to pull your weight and feel Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
exact and equal to it. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant. To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
By some estimates, no other living poet was read so widely in recent decades. Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
“Book sales may not mean much in the areas of fiction or biography, but for a poet to sell in the thousands is remarkable proof to his ability to speak in his poems to what are inadequately called ‘ordinary people,' ” The Irish Times wrote in an editorial after Mr. Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize. “Yet the popularity of his work should not be allowed to obscure the fact that this is deep, at times profound poetry, forged through hard thinking and an attentive, always tender openness to the world, especially the natural world.” By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Seamus Justin Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, on a farm called Mossbawn in County Derry in the western part of the British province of Northern Ireland. He was the eldest of nine children. Just like his old man.
He recalled his father, Patrick, a cattle dealer and farmer, as a dour man suspicious of verbiage. His mother, the former Margaret Kathleen McCann, also had little interest in literature, but, as Mr. Heaney recalled, she used to “recite lists of affixes and suffixes, and Latin roots, with their English meanings, rhymes that formed part of her early schooling in the early part of the century.” My grandfather cut more turf in a day
All around him, Mr. Heaney watched police and public officials of the predominantly Protestant province treat Catholics with disdain, sometimes with cruelty. One of his biographers, Michael Parker, wrote, “It could be argued that while Heaney’s exposure to what he now regards as ‘cultural colonialism’ may have bred feelings of inferiority and insecurity in the short term, in the long term it also honed his sense of identity and provided him with sustenance from two rich traditions.” Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Seamus proved to be a bright boy, and he was sent on a scholarship to St Columb’s College in Derry at the age of 12. His brother Christopher was killed in a road accident at the age of 4 while Mr. Heaney was studying at the school, and the later poems “Mid-Term Break” and “The Blackbird of Glanmore” refer to the death. Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Later he studied for a degree in English at Queen’s University in Belfast. He went to work as a schoolteacher, then a lecturer in English at Queen’s College in Belfast and later at Carysfort College, a teacher training school near Dublin. Then, in 1972, one of the most deadly years in the conflict in Northern Island’, he gave up full-time academic work to be a freelance writer, publishing the collection “Wintering Out.” Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
He began wrestling with the evils of Ulster’s sectarian strife and discrimination in his next collection, capturing the uneasiness of daily life in a divided society in poems such as “Whatever You Say Say Nothing” and “Funeral Rites.” To drink it, then fell to right away
For much of his career, Mr. Heaney was under pressure to write favorably about the goals of his fellow Catholics, many of whom wanted a Northern Ireland free of British control. But while his work often concerned the violence in Ulster, he saw both sides of the conflict and avoided polemics in support of the Irish Republican Army. Though he resented British oppression in Northern Ireland, he said, he admired much in British culture and English literature. Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
And he was wary of extreme positions. As a young man, Mr. Heaney said, he felt excited by the rise the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the outlawed group using violence to end Northern Ireland’s union with Britain. His views changed later. Over his shoulder, going down and down
“There was a sense of an utterly wasteful, cancerous stalemate, and that the violence was unproductive,” he said in 2009. “It was villainous, but you were living with it. Only after it stopped did you realize what you had lived with.” For the good turf. Digging.
Following his Nobel Prize, Mr. Heaney became a frequent lecturer at universities around the world and often conducted public readings in his resonant baritone voice. But he scaled back public commitments after he suffered the stroke. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Mr. Heaney is survived by his wife, Marie, and his children, Christopher, Michael and Catherine Ann. Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
The critic Richard Eder, writing in The Los Angeles Times, saw Mr. Heaney as something of a public poet, a bard who sprang from the farms and streets of his native country and who could speak directly to those who lived there with him. Through living roots awaken in my head.
“Art as the wizardry of style, on the one hand, and art as personal and public expression, on the other,” Mr. Eder wrote. “Not many can fuse the two nowadays, and no one writing in English does it so well as Heaney. He employs poetry’s power to tell truth, and the artist’s power to make us know that it is a truth we need.” But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
But for Mr. Heaney, poetry was ultimately not a political act, or an obligation. In the 1984 poetry collection, “Station Island,” he wrote: Between my finger and my thumb
The main thing is to write The squat pen rests.
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust I’ll dig with it.
that imagines its haven like your hands at night Though Mr. Heaney’s poems often have pastoral settings, dewy rural romanticism is notably absent: instead, he depicts country life in all its harsh daily reality. His poem “A Drink of Water” opens this way:
dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. She came every morning to draw water
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Like an old bat staggering up the field:
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest.” The pump’s whooping cough, the bucket’s clatter
And slow diminuendo as it filled,
Announced her. I recall
Her grey apron, the pocked white enamel
Of the brimming bucket, and the treble
Creak of her voice like the pump’s handle.
Mr. Heaney was deeply self-identified as Irish, and much of his work overtly concerned the Troubles, as the long, violent sectarian conflict in late-20th-century Northern Ireland is known.
But though he condemned British dominion in his homeland (he wrote: “Be advised, my passport’s green/No glass of ours was ever raised/To toast the Queen”), Mr. Heaney refused to disown British tradition — and especially British literature — altogether.
The writers who influenced him deeply, he said, included not only the Irishmen William Butler Yeats and James Joyce but also the Englishman Thomas Hardy.
In his poem “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” whose title became a byword in Northern Ireland for the linguistic subterfuge that underpins biographical conversations, Mr. Heaney wrote:
Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:
Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,
Subtle discrimination by addresses
With hardly an exception to the rule
That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod
And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,
Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
Where half of us, as in a wooden horse
Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks,
Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.
As a result of Mr. Heaney’s inclusive stance, some supporters of the Irish Republican cause condemned him as accommodationist. His rejoinder can be found, for instance, in lines from his 1974 essay on the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who was exiled to Siberia by Stalin’s regime and died there in 1938.
In the essay, Mr. Heaney set forth an observation that could be applied with equal force to contemporary Ireland:
“We live here in critical times ourselves, when the idea of poetry as an art is in danger of being overshadowed by a quest for poetry as a diagram of political attitudes,” he wrote. “Some commentators have all the fussy literalism of an official from the ministry of truth.”
The eldest of nine children of a cattle dealer, Seamus Justin Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, at Mossbawn, his family’s farm in County Derry, west of Belfast. The farm’s name would appear throughout his work.Mr. Heaney’s intoxication with language, he said in a 1974 lecture, “Feeling into Words,” “began very early when my mother used to recite lists of affixes and suffixes, and Latin roots, with their English meanings, rhymes that formed part of her schooling in the early part of the century.”
Later in the essay, he ventured an alternative scenario: “Maybe it was stirred by the beautiful sprung rhythms of the old BBC weather forecast: Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Shetland, Faroes, Finisterre; or with the gorgeous and inane phraseology of the catechism; or with the litany of the Blessed Virgin that was part of the enforced poetry in our household: Tower of Gold, Ark of the Covenant, Gate of Heaven, Morning Star, Health of the Sick, Refuge of Sinners, Comforter of the Afflicted.”
In 1961, Mr. Heaney earned a bachelor’s degree with first class honors in English language and literature from Queen’s University of Belfast. He wrote poetry as a student, publishing under the modest pseudonym Incertus, the Latin word for “doubtful.”
He went on to earn a teaching certificate in English from St. Joseph’s College in Belfast and was later appointed to the faculty there. He began writing poetry seriously in the mid-1960s, joining a workshop led by the noted Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon.
Mr. Heaney followed “Death of a Naturalist” with collections including “Door Into the Dark” (1969), “Wintering Out” (1972), “Station Island” (1984) and “The Midnight Verdict,” published in 1993.
In 1995, he became the fourth Irishman to win the Nobel in Literature, following Yeats, who received it in 1923; George Bernard Shaw (1925); and Samuel Beckett (1969).
In awarding the prize to Mr. Heaney, the Swedish Academy cited his “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past” and also commended his cleareyed analysis of the Northern Ireland conflict.
Though Mr. Heaney was lauded throughout his career, a few critics condemned his work as facile.
“If Heaney really is the best we can do, then the whole troubled, exploratory thrust of modern poetry has been a diversion from the right true way,” the poet and critic Al Alvarez (also known as A. Alvarez) said in The New York Review of Books in 1980, reviewing Mr. Heaney’s collection “Field Work.” Mr. Alvarez continued:
“Eliot and his contemporaries, Lowell and his, Plath and hers had it all wrong: to try to make clearings of sense and discipline and style in the untamed, unfenced darkness was to mistake morbidity for inspiration.”
Among Mr. Heaney’s other volumes of poetry are “The Spirit Level” (1996); “Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996” (1998); “Electric Light” (2001); “District and Circle” (2006); and his last, “Human Chain,” published in 2010.
Mr. Heaney’s survivors include his wife, the former Marie Devlin, whom he married in 1965; two sons, Christopher and Michael; and a daughter, Catherine, The Associated Press reported.
His other writings include critical essays on Yeats, Joyce, Joseph Brodsky, Ted Hughes, Stevie Smith and Italo Calvino; “Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971-2001” (2002); and a verse translation of “Beowulf” published in 2002.
In “The Cure at Troy,” his 1991 verse adaptation of Sophocles’ play “Philoctetes,” about the Trojan War, Mr. Heaney wrote these evocative lines:
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
In April, Vice President Joseph R. Biden, citing Mr. Heaney as “one of my favorite poets,” quoted those lines at the memorial service for Sean Collier, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer killed in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings.
Mr. Heaney was the subject of a spate of critics studies and the biographical volume “Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet” (1993), by Michael Parker.
In a 1991 interview with the British newsmagazine The Economist, Mr. Heaney described his essential professional mandate.
“The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world,” he said. “It means being vigilant in the public realm. But you can go further still and say that poetry tries to help you to be a truer, purer, wholer being.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 30, 2013Correction: August 30, 2013

In an earlier version of this article, Enda Kenny, the prime minister of Ireland, was described incorrectly. He is a man.

In an earlier version of this article, Enda Kenny, the prime minister of Ireland, was described incorrectly. He is a man.