Poems of Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) was born on a farm in County Derry, Northern Ireland, and became the most celebrated Irish poet since W.B. Yeats. His debut collection, Death of a Naturalist (Faber and Faber, 1966), announced a major new voice steeped in rural Irish landscape and the textures of ordinary life. His later work engaged the political violence of the Troubles, memory, and translation, most notably in Field Work (1979), Station Island (1984), and his acclaimed translation of Beowulf (Faber, 1999), which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He taught at Harvard University and was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1989 to 1994.