Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel laureate in Literature who was often described as the greatest Irish poet since Yeats, died Friday in Dublin. He was 74.
His publisher, Faber & Faber, announced the death. The apparent cause was complications of a stroke Heaney suffered in 2006.
The nation is in a deep mourning that only the poet himself could describe, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny said. “For us, Seamus Heaney was the keeper of our language, our codes, our essence as a people,” she told The Irish Times.
A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney, a Roman Catholic, was renowned for work that 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.
“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:
“The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
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.”
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.
In his hands, that language was plain and clear, with images of bogs and rocks and streams, as well as epiphanies of the soul. For Heaney, nature provided settings for moral problems.
After he gained fame with The Death of a Naturalist, 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. Fellow poet Robert Lowell, for one, called him the “most important Irish poet since Yeats.”
By some estimates, no other living poet was read so widely in recent decades.
“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 Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize. “Yet the popularity of his work should not be allowed to obscure the fact that this deep, at times profound poetry, was forged through hard thinking and an attentive, always tender openness to the world, especially the natural world.”
Seamus Justin Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, on a farm called Mossbawn in County Derry in the western part of Northern Ireland. He was the eldest of nine children.
All around him, 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.”
After his Nobel Prize, 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 the stroke.
Heaney is survived by his wife, Marie, and his children, Christopher, Michael and Catherine Ann.
The critic Richard Eder, writing in The Los Angeles Times, saw 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.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 08/31/2013