Séamus Heaney was born in 1939 on a farm called Mossbawn in Co. Derry. His
father was a farmer and cattle trader. He performed well in school and went
on to receive a degree in English Language and Literature from Queen's University,
Belfast, becoming interested in poets such as Ted Hughes, Patrick
Kavanagh and Robert Frost, whose work was rooted in their native backgrounds.
Declining an offer to undertake further study at Oxford, Heaney trained instead
as a teacher and took up a teaching job in Belfast, while still pursuing his
writing. Following the success of his early work, he was appointed lecturer
in English at Queen's University, at a time when the war in the North of Ireland
was gaining force. A year lecturing at the University of California saw Heaney
embracing a more free form of poetry. Not long after this, finding the state
of affairs in Northern Ireland increasingly difficult, he resigned his position
at Queen's and moved with his wife and their children, first to Wicklow and
later to Sandymount in Dublin, where he still lives. His works include: "Death
of a Naturalist", "North", "Field Work",
and "Seeing Things"
He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, reinforcing his reputation
as one of Ireland's finest and best-loved poets.
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"Suspect too much sweet talk
But never close your mind.
It was a fortunate wind
That blew me here. I leave
Half-ready to believe
That a crippled trust might walk
And the half-true rhyme is love."
"Forgive the way I have lived indifferent--
forgive my timid circumspect involvement."
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