Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was born near Castledawson, County Derry, and grew up on his father’s small farm. He was the eldest in a Catholic family of nine children.

In 1961 Heaney graduated from Queen’s University, Belfast, where he also became a lecturer at Queen’s University before Harvard College in Boston. Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

In 1981 Heaney accepted a post as Visiting Professor at Harvard where in 1984, he was elected Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry. The T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Canterbury in 1986 were published with other critical writings as ‘The Government of the Tongue’ (1988) – a title which underlines Heaney’s conviction that poetry is a form of responsible government.

According to Heaney, poetry balances the “scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium”. From the early collections, Heaney has combined in his work personal memories with images of Irish heritage and the landscape of Northern Ireland.

‘The Death of a Naturalist’ is the first regularly published book by the Nobel Prize-winning poet. It consists of 34 short poems and is largely concerned with childhood experiences and the formulation of adult identities, family relationships, and rural life. The collection begins with one of Heaney’s best-known poems, ‘Digging’, and includes the acclaimed ‘Death of a Naturalist’.