Seamus Heaney, born in April 1939, in Ireland, is the oldest of nine children. His father owned and ran a small farm and was committed to cattle-dealing. His mother worked “in service” to a mill owner’s family. The connection to cattle-herding and the industrial revolution was significant in his upbringing, so was he mother’s outspoken style compared to his father’s quietness. While growing up, he witnessed American soldiers preparing for invasion, leaving him between “history and ignorance” and leading to his poetic development. At age 12, he won a scholarship to attend St. Columb’s College in Derry, forty miles from his home. A move he described as the “removal from ‘the earth of farm and labour to the heaven of education.’” He then attended Queen’s University where he progressed as a poet. Later he transferred to Belfast where he lived from 1957 to 1972, working as a teacher and publishing his first poems. The society he was born into was one divided by religious and political philosophies. Following this period he moved to the Irish Republic. While working as a poet, he met his future wife Marie Devlin, who would later give birth to three of his children and as act as characters in his poems. Since 1982 he has periodically taught in America, and taught at Harvard University from 1985 to 2006. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 and has been awarded the Whitbread prize twice.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/seamus-heaney
To read his poems: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/seamus_heaney/poems
I was first inspired to study the work of Seamus Heaney after reading his poem “Mid-Term Break” in class, which I found to be incredibly sad. After researching more about Mr. Heaney I discovered that this poem was of an autobiographical nature, based on the death of his younger brother at the age of four. After learning this I was surprised he could be so restrained in his writing of this topic even though he experienced the incident first hand. During my research of Seamus Heaney, I began to feel connected and a great respect for his writing.
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