Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney, acclaimed by many as the best Irish poet since WB Yeats, has died aged 74.

Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past".

Over his long career he was awarded numerous prizes and received many honours for his work.

He recently suffered from ill health.

His 2010 poetry collection The Human Chain was written after he suffered a stroke and the central poem, Miracle, was directly inspired by his illness.

Heaney in 1970, two years before he gave up full-time academic work to become a freelance writer and poet

Recalling how he had been lifted up and down the stairs to his bedroom, the poet eulogised the biblical characters who carried a paralysed man to Jesus to be healed.

"Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked / In their backs, the stretcher handles / Slippery with sweat. And no let up."
'Profound sorrow'

"The death has taken place of Seamus Heaney," said a short statement issued by his family on Friday.

"The poet and Nobel laureate died in hospital in Dublin this morning after a short illness. The family has requested privacy at this time."

Heaney's publisher, Faber, said: "We cannot adequately express our profound sorrow at the loss of one of the world's greatest writers. His impact on literary culture is immeasurable.

"As his publisher we could not have been prouder to publish his work over nearly 50 years. He was nothing short of an inspiration to the company, and his friendship over many years is a great loss."

Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate and a friend of Heaney, told The Telegraph that Heaney was "a great poet, a wonderful writer about poetry, and a person of truly exceptional grace and intelligence."

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon told BBC Radio 3: "One of his great gifts was to allow people in who were not necessarily that interested in poetry... and I think that's one of the reasons why he occupies such an extraordinary place in people's hearts."

Heaney was born in April 1939, the eldest of nine children, on a farm near Toomebridge in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, but as a child moved to the village of Bellaghy.

He was educated at St Columb's College, Derry, a Catholic boarding school, and later at Queen's University Belfast, before training as a teacher. He settled in Dublin, with periods of teaching in the US.

Heaney was an honorary fellow at Trinity College Dublin and, last year, was bestowed with the Seamus Heaney Professorship in Irish Writing at the university, which he described as a great honour.

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was internationally recognised as the greatest Irish poet since WB Yeats. Like Yeats, he won the Nobel Prize for literature and, like Yeats, his reputation and influence spread far beyond literary circles.

Born in Northern Ireland, he was a Catholic and nationalist who chose to live in the South. "Be advised, my passport's green / No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast the Queen," he once wrote.

He came under pressure to take sides during the 25 years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and faced criticism for his perceived ambivalence to republican violence, but he never allowed himself to be co-opted as a spokesman for violent extremism.

His writing addressed the conflict, however, often seeking to put it in a wider historical context. The poet also penned elegies to friends and acquaintances who died in the violence.

Describing his reticence to become a "spokesman" for the Troubles, Heaney once said he had "an early warning system telling me to get back inside my own head".

Born on 13 April, 1939, on a family farm in the rural heart of County Londonderry, he never forgot the world he came from. "I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells / Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss," he recalled in Personal Helicon.

He was a translator, broadcaster and prose writer of distinction, but his poetry was his most remarkable achievement, for its range, its consistent quality and its impact on readers: Love poems, epic poems, poems about memory and the past, poems about conflict and civil strife, poems about the natural world, poems addressed to friends, poems that found significance in the everyday or delighted in the possibilities of the English language.

The very first poem in his first major collection was called Digging, and it described his father digging potatoes and his grandfather digging turf. It ended:

But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I'll dig with it.

His roots lay deep in the Irish countryside

It proved to be his manifesto. He spent a lifetime digging with his pen, but returned often in his poetry to the landscape and society of his boyhood in a countryside of farms and small towns, where Protestant and Catholic rubbed along tolerably, if warily, and one of his earliest memories was listening to the shipping forecast on the BBC.

He was a bright boy: At the age of 12 he was sent on a scholarship to St Columb's College in Derry and studied for a degree in English at Queen's University in Belfast.

He became a schoolteacher, then a lecturer, at Queen's and later head of English at Carysfort College, a teacher training college near Dublin.

For more than 20 years from 1985 he spent part of each year at Harvard as a visiting professor and later Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory, and then as poet in residence. From 1989 to 1994 he was professor of poetry at Oxford.