Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney has passed away. He was 74.
Follow the links below to read free poems by Heaney from the Poetry Foundation. Here’s more about his early life from the Nobel Prize site:
The poet’s mother came from a family called McCann whose connections were more with the modern world than with the traditional rural economy; her uncles and relations were employed in the local linen mill and an aunt had worked “in service” to the mill owners’ family. 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. His father was notably sparing of talk and his mother notably ready to speak out, a circumstance which Seamus Heaney believes to have been fundamental to the “quarrel with himself” out of which his poetry arises.
Seamus Heaney Poems Online
A Dog Was Crying To-Night in Wicklow Also
Casualty
Digging
Gifts of Rain
Glanmore Sonnets
May
Mycenae Nightwatch
North
Remembered Columns
Singing School