Catholic student arranged civil rights marches that had much similarities with protest movements in elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. British troops were sent to restore peace in Belfast and Londonderry. Heaney left Belfats at the height of this conflict, but his work reflects his experiences of that time. After NORTH (1975), in which Heaney addressed the ongoing civil strife in Northern Ireland, he was considered the finest Irish poet since W.B. Yeats, and with Ted Hughes among the leading poets in English. Heaney's works have developed from the early clotted expression to greater simplicity and clarity. His poems are rooted in Northern Irish rural life, and draw on myth and unique aspects of the Irish experience. Heaney's reflections on his childhood gave way to darker commentaries on the social and political problems in Northern Ireland. In THE GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE (1988) Heaney questioned the role of poetry in modern sociaty. The central symbol in the author's work is the bog, the wide unfenced county that reaches back millions of years. The bog is the staring point for the exploration of the past, the material and cultural remains of an ancient race, the older Norse and Viking worlds. The political situation in Northern Ireland is explored in North and Field Work (1979), from the standpoint of Heaney's Catholic background. However, Heaney has been consistent in his refusal to reduce complex political and social issues to simple slogans. Strong individualistic, meditative mood marks his later works, including STATION ISLAND (1984), THE HAW LANTERN (1987), and SEEING THINGS (1991). His poems have often been allegorical and he has drawn on the Divine Comedy of Dante and on the work of such contemporary central European writers as Czeslaw Milosz. In his Nobel lecture in 1995 Heaney defended poetry "as the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive world politics.
Heaney's work as translator includes SWEENEY ASTRAY (1983), from the mediaval Irish poem about an Irish king who went mad during a battle and was turned into a bird; THE CURE AT TROY (1991), Heaney's rendering into English of Sophocles' Philoctetes., and the Anglo-Saxon poem BEOWULF (1999), which was composed towards the end of the first millenium. The translation won the Whitebread Award as the best book of 1999. "You have won renown: you are known to all men
far and near, now and forever. Your sway is wide as the wind's home,
as the sea around cliffs."
(from Beowulf, trans. by Heaney)
The epic records the great deed of the heroic warrior Beowulf in his youth and maturity.