Seamus (Justin) Heaney (1939-)
Irish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. According to Heaney, poetry balances the "scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium." From the early collections, Heaney have combined in his works deep personal memories, his rural background and local things with a common Irish heritage. "Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very remote. And when this intellectual predisposition co-exists with the actualities of Ulster and Israel and Bosnia and Rwanda and a host of other wounded spots on the face of the earth, the inclination is not only not to credit human nature with much constructive potential but not to credit anything too positive in the work of art." (from Nobel Lecture, 1995)
Seamus Heaney was born near Castledawson, County Derry, and grew up on his father's cattle farm. He was the eldest in a Catholic family of nine children. Heaney attended St. Columb's College, Derry, and moved in 1957 to Belfast to continued his studies. In 1961 Heaney graduated from Queen's University, Belfast, and was then trained as teacher at St. Joseph's College of Education. After one year as a secondary school teacher Heaney returned to St. Josephs, where he was a lecturer for three years. In 1966 he became a lecturer at Queen University. In 1972 Heaney gave up his work at Queen's. Partly to escape the turmoil and tensions of Belfast, he moved from to County Wicklow, where he was a freelance writer for three years. He then taught at Carysfort College of Education until 1981. Next year, after spending frequent periods as a guest professor at American universities, he was appointed visiting professor at Harvard. Since 1985 he has been there as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Between the years 1989 and 1994 he held Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. Heaney's first book, ELEVEN POEMS, appeared in 1965. He won in 1966 the Eric Gregory Award with DEATH OF A NATURALIST at the age of 27, and establised his reputation as a poet. Heaney was in Belfast at the outbreak, in 1969, of what has become known as 'The Troubles'. In 1968-69 arouse serious disturbances from Protestant political dominance and discrimination against the Roman Catholic minority in employment and housing.