List of Works

Poetry
Death of a Naturalist (1966)
Door Into the Dark (1969)
The Haw Lantern (1987)
Electric Light (2001)
Human Chain (2010)

Prose
Government of the Tongue (1988)
The Red Dress of Poetry (1995)

Son of Ireland

Young Seamus Heaney

Criticism

Heaney's poetry has been met with much praise for his work on the clashes between Protestants and Catholics, his imaginative language and metaphors, and his use of common speak for the every man.  Some consider him Ireland's greatest poet since Keats. Critics have appreciated his sense of responsibility as a poet. Helen Vendler, head of the English Department at Harvard, said of Heaney shortly after his Nobel Prize win in 1995, "the Irish poet whose pen has been the conscience of Ireland."

However, Heaney is not without his skeptics. Many literary academics do not consider him to be in the same league as Keats.  There are some who argue his writing is too simplistic and one-dimensional.  Blake Morrison put it best saying, Seamus Heaney the author is "that rare thing, a poet rated highly by critics and academics yet popular with the common reader."

Writing Envirement

Much of Heaney's poetry was born out of the Irish conflict that involved the Irish Resistance Army as well as the clashing between the Protestant, Christian, and Anglican communities.  The poet was personally affected when his cousin was shot in 1974, arguably the most deadly year of the country's unrest. When asked exactly what time he began to shift his poem's focus towards political statements, Heaney answered by saying once the conflict had grown in the 70's, he and other writers could not ignore it because it was in the "psyche" of everyone. However, where Heaney fell on the political spectrum was never clear. In 1998 Ireland had achieved peace, and Heaney turned his focus to keeping a mutual peace and maintain the stable social environment.

Biography

Much of Heaney's writing is saturated with farm life, political expression, and pride of his Irish heritage. Heaney lived on a farm in Deaney until he was fourteen.  This move deeply saddened him and inspired the theme of Death of a Naturalist, "loss of innocence in childhood."  Being the eldest of nine children, Irish rituals demanded his presence at all local funerals of the bog people, so the poet was exposed to much death as a child.  This death came out in his writing such as Mid-Term Break and Funeral Rites.

It was in a boarding school during his high school years that Heaney discovered his biggest literary influence, T.S. Eliot. From The Hollow Men to Wasteland, Heaney began reading the literary giant's work and was instantly captivated by the power use of language that would "haunt him" everywhere he went.  In his own words, "T,S, Eliot was the way."

 At St.Columb's College Heaney was taught Irish and Latin. This schooling was pivotal in the creation of Heaney's most famous work, a translation of the classic epic, Beowulf, which was met with rave reviews.
Much of Heaney's writing produced out of his youth was self-centered. It detailed his childhood on the farm, but the tone of his poetry shifted after Bloody Sunday resulted in the death of 13 men in his hometown of Deaney.  Heaney wrote about this incident in "Door into the Dark" and his poetry took on a politically-driven message after that.

Heaney spent much of his adult life teaching Rhetoric and Oratory at several colleges in the United Kingdom and the United States. He also earned several awards including: the E.M. Forester award, T.S. Eliot award, and the Nobel Prize in Literature for "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth; which exalts everyday miracles and the past." His work is not only critically acclaimed, but he is the best selling poet in the UK, making up 2/3 of all sales for living poets.

Heaney, 72, suffered a stroke in 2006, but he survived. He now lives in Dublin although he still considers Deaney to be the "Country of his Mind" and a place that still births much of his poetry.

Storm on the Island (1966)

We are prepared: we build our houses squat,
Sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate.
The wizened earth has never troubled us
With hay, so as you can see, there are no stacks
Or stooks that can be lost. Nor are there trees
Which might prove company when it blows full
Blast: you know what i mean--leaves and branches
Can raise a tragic chorus in a gale
So that you can listen to the thing you fear
Forgetting that it pummels your house too
But there are no trees, no natural shelter.
You might think that the sea is company,
Exploding comfortably down on the cliffs
But no: when it begins, the flung spray hits
The very windows, spits like a tame cat
Turned savage. We just sit tight while wind dives
And strafes invisibly. Space is a salvo.
We are bombarded by the empty air.
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.