BOGLAND

BOGLAND

HeaneySeamus 

Seamus Heaney (b. April 13,1939) is a poet, writer and lecturer from northern Ireland. He is one of the most widely known and important poets working in English, or perhaps any language, today.

Heaney was born, the eldest of nine children, on a farm called moss awn, in county Derry thirty miles to the northwest of Belfast , in Northern Ireland. He was brought up a catholic. As a child he remembered watching American soldiers practicing for the D-Day landings. The family left the farm in 1953. He was educated at the local primary school and St. Columb’s , a catholic boarding school in Derry to which he awarded a scholarship. At st  Columbs he was taught the Irish language . He then attended queen’s university, Belfast.

In the sixties Heaney trained as a teacher and  worked in school in Belfast  and Ballymurphy. It was at this time that he first started to publish poetry, beginning in 1962. His first book, death of a naturalist, was published in 1968. In met with much critical acclaim. In 1965 he met and married marries Devlin . (Devlin is a writer herself and in 1994 published over nine waves a collection of traditional Irish myths and legends.) they had three children .

Throughout  the sixties, he was working, at formal meetings, with a number of writers including Michael Longley , Derek Mahon and Philip Hobs Baum. In the seventies younger poets attended these meetings, now rub by Heaney, including Paul Muldoon and frank Ormsby . In 12 with Michael Longley Heaney took part in a reading tour called ‘ room to Rhyme ‘, this lead to quite a lot of exposure for the poet’s work . He was appointed  to the Arts   Council in the Republic of Ireland in 1974 .He became an elected Saoi of Aosdana , in the Republic of Ireland in 11972  Heaney left his  lectureship at  Belfast and moved to the republic working at a teacher training college in Dublin . In 1984 , Heaney was appointed Boylston  professor of rhetoric and Oratory , at Harvard University . In 1989 , he was elected to be professor of Poetry at Oxford  University , which he held for a five -year  term to 1994 (not requiring residence in Oxford ).

Through  this time he was publishing prolifically and dividing his time between Ireland  and America. He also continued to give public readings which were very popular . So well attended and keenly anticipated were these events that those who queued for tickets with such enthusiasm have sometimes been dubbed ‘ Heaney boppers’ suggesting an almost pop- music fanaticism on the part of his supporters .

He was  awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.