Seamus heaney who is he

The poet has commented on the fact that his parentage thus contains both the Ireland of the cattle-herding Gaelic past and the Ulster of the Industrial Revolution; indeed, he considers this to have been a significant tension in his background, something which corresponds to another inner tension also inherited from his parents, namely that between speech and silence. Heaney grew up as a country boy and attended the local primary school. As a very young child, he watched American soldiers on manoeuvres in the local fields, in preparation for the Normandy invasion of When he was twelve years of age, Seamus Heaney won a scholarship to St.

It would be followed in years to come by a transfer to Belfast where he lived between and , and by another move from Belfast to the Irish Republic where Heaney has made his home, and then, since , by regular, annual periods of teaching in America. At St. The first verses he wrote when he was a young teacher in Belfast in the early s and many of the best known poems in North , his important volume published in , are linguistically tuned to the Anglo-Saxon note in English.

Station Island reveals Dante, for example, as a crucial influence, and echoes of Virgil — as well as a translation from Book VI of The Aeneid — are to be found in Seeing Things Often he paints the gray and damp Irish landscape; peat moss has a special place in his poetry.

The poems often are connected with daily experiences, but they also derive motifs from history, all the way back to prehistoric times. Seamus Heaney's profound interest in the Celtic and the pre-Christian as well as in Catholic literary tradition has found expression in a number of essays and translations.

Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive. Life Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland, where his family engaged in farming and selling cattle. Work Seamus Heaney's poetry is often down-to-earth. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. William Butler Yeats was one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote more than 60 plays during his lifetime and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in James Joyce was an Irish, modernist writer who wrote in a ground-breaking style that was known both for its complexity and explicit content.

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