Seamus Heaney

Seamus Justin Heaney (13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is '' Death of a Naturalist'' (1966), his first major published volume. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, ''The Independent'' described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".

Heaney was born in the townland of Tamniaran between Castledawson and Toomebridge, Northern Ireland. His family moved to nearby Bellaghy when he was a boy. He became a lecturer at St. Joseph's College in Belfast in the early 1960s, after attending Queen's University, and began to publish poetry. He lived in Sandymount, Dublin, from 1976 until his death. He lived part-time in the United States from 1981 to 2006. He was a professor at Harvard from 1981 to 1997, and their Poet in Residence from 1988 to 2006. From 1989 to 1994, he was also the Professor of Poetry at Oxford. In 1996 he was made a and in 1998 was bestowed the title Saoi of Aosdána. He received numerous prestigious awards.

Heaney is buried at St. Mary's Church, Bellaghy, Northern Ireland. The headstone bears the epitaph "Walk on air against your better judgement", from his poem "The Gravel Walks".

Early life

Heaney was born on 13 April 1939 at the family farmhouse called Mossbawn, Archived at Wayback Engine. between Castledawson and Toomebridge; he was the first of nine children. In 1953, his family moved to Bellaghy, a few miles away, which is now the family home. His father was Patrick Heaney (d. October 1986), a farmer and cattle dealer, and the eighth child of ten born to James and Sarah Heaney. Patrick was introduced to cattle dealing by his uncles, who raised him after his parents' early deaths. Heaney's mother was Margaret Kathleen McCann (1911–1984), whose relatives worked at a local linen mill. Heaney remarked on the inner tension between the rural Gaelic past exemplified by his father and the industrialized Ulster exemplified by his mother.

Heaney attended Anahorish Primary School, and won a scholarship to St Columb's College, a Roman Catholic boarding school in Derry when he was twelve years old. While studying at St Columb's, Heaney's younger brother Christopher was killed in February 1953 at the age of four in a road accident. The poems " Mid-Term Break" and " The Blackbird of Glanmore" are related to his brother's death.

Heaney played Gaelic football for Castledawson GAC, the club in the area of his birth, as a boy, and did not change to Bellaghy when his family moved there. However, he has remarked that he became involved culturally with Bellaghy GAA Club in his late teens, acting in amateur plays and composing treasure hunts for the club.

Career

1957–1969

Heaney studied English Language and Literature at Queen's University Belfast starting in 1957. While there, he found a copy of Ted Hughes's ''Lupercal,'' which spurred him to write poetry. "Suddenly, the matter of contemporary poetry was the material of my own life," he said. He graduated in 1961 with a First Class Honours degree.

Heaney studied for a teacher certification at St Joseph's Teacher Training College in Belfast (now merged with St Mary's, University College), and began teaching at St Thomas' Secondary Intermediate School in Ballymurphy, Belfast. The headmaster of this school was the writer Michael McLaverty, who introduced Heaney to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh.Ed. Bernard O'Donoghue ''The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney'' (2009) Cambridge University Press pxiii
. Retrieved 23 May 2010. With McLaverty's mentorship, Heaney first started to publish poetry in 1962. Sophia Hillan describes how McLaverty was like a foster father to the younger Belfast poet. In the introduction to McLaverty's ''Collected Works,'' Heaney summarised the poet's contribution and influence: "His voice was modestly pitched, he never sought the limelight, yet for all that, his place in our literature is secure." Heaney's poem "Fosterage", in the sequence "Singing School", from ''North'' (1975), is dedicated to him.

In 1963 Heaney began lecturing at St Joseph's, and joined the Belfast Group, a poets' workshop organized by Philip Hobsbaum, then an English lecturer at Queen's University. Through this, Heaney met other Belfast poets, including Derek Mahon and Michael Longley.

Heaney met Marie Devlin, a native of Ardboe, County Tyrone, while at St Joseph's in 1962; they married in August 1965 and would go on to have three children. A school teacher and writer, Devlin published ''Over Nine Waves'' (1994), a collection of traditional Irish myths and legends. Heaney's first book, ''Eleven Poems,'' was published in November 1965 for the Queen's University Festival. In 1966 their first son, Michael, was born. He earned a living at the time by writing for ''The Irish Times'', often on the subject of radio. A second son, Christopher, was born in 1968.

Heaney initially sought publication with Dolmen Press in Dublin for his first volume of work. While waiting to hear back, he was signed with Faber and Faber and published '' Death of a Naturalist'' in 1966, and Faber remained his publisher for the rest of his life. This collection was met with much critical acclaim and won several awards, including the Gregory Award for Young Writers and the Geoffrey Faber Prize. The same year, he was appointed as a lecturer in Modern English Literature at Queen's University Belfast. In 1968, Heaney and Michael Longley undertook a reading tour called ''Room to Rhyme'', which increased awareness of the poet's work. The following year, he published his second major volume, ''Door into the Dark''.

1970–1984

Heaney taught as a visiting professor in English at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1970–1971 academic year. In 1972, he left his lectureship in Belfast, moved to Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland, and began writing on a full-time basis. That year, he published his third collection, '' Wintering Out''. His daughter Catherine Ann was born in 1973. In 1975, Heaney's next volume, ''North'', was published. A pamphlet of prose poems entitled ''Stations'' was published the same year.

In 1976 Heaney was appointed Head of English at Carysfort College in Dublin and moved with his family to the suburb of Sandymount. His next collection, ''Field Work'', was published in 1979. '' Selected Poems 1965-1975'' and ''Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978'' were published in 1980. When '' Aosdána,'' the national Irish Arts Council, was established in 1981, Heaney was among those elected into its first group. (He was subsequently elected a '' Saoi,'' one of its five elders and its highest honour, in 1997).

Also in 1981, Heaney travelled to the United States as a visiting professor at Harvard, where he was affiliated with Adams House. He was awarded two honorary doctorates, from Queen's University and from Fordham University in New York City (1982). At the Fordham commencement ceremony on 23 May 1982, Heaney delivered his address as a 46-stanza poem entitled "Verses for a Fordham Commencement."

Born and educated in Northern Ireland, Heaney stressed that he was Irish and not British. Following the success of the Field Day Theatre Company's production of Brian Friel's ''Translations,'' the founders Brian Friel and Stephen Rea decided to make the company a permanent group. Heaney joined the company's expanded Board of Directors in 1981. In autumn 1984, his mother, Margaret, died. Three years later he would publish eight sonnets, under the title ''Clearances'', as a tribute to his mother.

1985–1999

Heaney became a tenured faculty member at Harvard, as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory (formerly visiting professor) 1985–1997, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence at Harvard 1998–2006. In 1986, Heaney received a Litt.D. from Bates College. His father, Patrick, died in October the same year. The loss of both parents within two years affected Heaney deeply, and he expressed his grief in poems. In 1988, a collection of his critical essays, ''The Government of the Tongue'', was published.

In 1985 Heaney wrote the poem "From the Republic of Conscience" at the request of Amnesty International Ireland. He wanted to "celebrate United Nations Day and the work of Amnesty". The poem inspired the title of Amnesty International's highest honour, the Ambassador of Conscience Award.

In 1988 Heaney donated his lecture notes to the Rare Book Library of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, after giving the notable Ellmann Lectures there.

In 1989 Heaney was elected Oxford Professor of Poetry, which he held for a five-year term to 1994. The chair does not require residence in Oxford. Throughout this period, he divided his time between Ireland and the United States. He also continued to give public readings. These events were so well attended and keenly anticipated that those who queued for tickets with such enthusiasm were sometimes dubbed "Heaneyboppers", suggesting an almost teenybopper fan base.

In 1990 '' The Cure at Troy'', a play based on Sophocles's ''Philoctetes,'' was published. The next year, he published another volume of poetry, '' Seeing Things'' (1991). Heaney was named an Honorary Patron of the University Philosophical Society, Trinity College Dublin, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1991).

In 1993 Heaney guest-edited '' The Mays Anthology'', a collection of new writing from students at the University of Oxford and University of Cambridge. That same year, he was awarded the Dickinson College Arts Award and returned to the Pennsylvania college to deliver the commencement address and receive an honorary degree. He was scheduled to return to Dickinson again to receive the Harold and Ethel L. Stellfox Award—for a major literary figure—at the time of his death in 2013. Irish poet Paul Muldoon was named recipient of the award that year, partly in recognition of the close connection between the two poets.

Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past". He was on holiday in Greece with his wife when the news broke. Neither journalists nor his own children could reach him until he arrived at Dublin Airport two days later, although an Irish television camera traced 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: "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." He and his wife Marie were immediately taken from the airport to Áras an Uachtaráin for champagne with President Mary Robinson. He would refer to the prize discreetly as "the N thing" in personal exchanges with others.

Heaney's 1996 collection '' The Spirit Level'' won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award; he repeated the success in 1999 with '' Beowulf: A New Verse Translation''.

Heaney was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1996 and was admitted in 1997. In the same year, Heaney was elected Saoi of Aosdána. In 1998, Heaney was elected Honorary Fellow of Trinity College Dublin.

2000s

In 2000 Heaney was awarded an honorary doctorate and delivered the commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2002, Heaney was awarded an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University and delivered a public lecture on "The Guttural Muse".

In 2003 the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry was opened at Queen's University Belfast. It houses the Heaney Media Archive, a record of Heaney's entire oeuvre, along with a full catalogue of his radio and television presentations. That same year, Heaney decided to lodge a substantial portion of his literary archive at Emory University as a memorial to the work of William M. Chace, the university's recently retired president. The Emory papers represented the largest repository of Heaney's work (1964–2003). He donated these to help build their large existing archive of material from Irish writers including Yeats, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Michael Longley and other members of the Belfast Group.

In 2003, when asked if there was any figure in popular culture who aroused interest in poetry and lyrics, Heaney praised American rap artist Eminem from Detroit, saying, "He has created a sense of what is possible. He has sent a voltage around a generation. He has done this not just through his subversive attitude but also his verbal energy." Heaney wrote the poem " Beacons at Bealtaine" to mark the 2004 EU Enlargement. He read the poem at a ceremony for the 25 leaders of the enlarged European Union, arranged by the Irish EU presidency.

In August 2006 Heaney had a stroke. Although he recovered and joked, "Blessed are the pacemakers" when fitted with a heart monitor,"Heaney bid farewell at funeral"
''Belfast Telegraph'', 2 September 2013. he cancelled all public engagements for several months. He was in County Donegal at the time of the 75th birthday of Anne Friel, wife of playwright Brian Friel. He read the works of Henning Mankell, Donna Leon and Robert Harris while in hospital. Among his visitors was former President Bill Clinton.

Heaney's ''District and Circle'' won the 2006 T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2008, he became artist of honour in Østermarie, Denmark, and Seamus Heaney Stræde (street) was named after him. In 2009, Heaney was presented with an Honorary-Life Membership award from the University College Dublin (UCD) Law Society, in recognition of his remarkable role as a literary figure.

Faber and Faber published Dennis O'Driscoll's book '' Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney'' in 2008; this has been described as the nearest thing to an autobiography of Heaney. In 2009, Heaney was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. He recorded a spoken word album, over 12 hours long, of himself reading his poetry collections to commemorate his 70th birthday, which occurred on 13 April 2009.

2010s

He spoke at the West Belfast Festival in July 2010 in celebration of his mentor, the poet and novelist Michael McLaverty

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases