Who is Seamus Heaney?
Seamus Heaney was born in April 1939, the eldest member of a family which would eventually contain nine children. His father owned and worked a small farm of some fifty acres in County Derry in Northern Ireland, but the father’s real commitment was to cattle-dealing. There was something very congenial to Patrick Heaney about the cattle-dealer’s way of life to which he was introduced by the uncles who had cared for him after the early death of his own parents. 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 corresp
poet and auther from ireland info from wikipedia: Seamus Heaney was born the eldest of nine children at the family farmhouse called Mossbawn, near Castledawson, thirty miles to the north-west of Belfast, in Northern Ireland. When he was a young boy his family moved to Bellaghy, a few miles away, which is now the family home. He was educated initially at Anahorish Primary School nearby where he won a scholarship to St Columb’s College, then a Catholic boarding school in Derry. While studying at St Columb’s his four-year-old brother Christopher was killed in a road accident, an event that he would later write about in two poems, “Mid-Term Break” and “The Blackbird of Glanmore”. In 1957, Heaney travelled to Belfast to study English Language and Literature at the Queen’s University of Belfast. He graduated in 1961 with a First Class Honours degree. During teacher training at St Joseph’s Teacher Training College in Belfast, he went on a placement to St Thomas’ secondary Intermediate School
When Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, he was widely acclaimed as the best Irish poet since the last Irish poet to win the prize in 1923, William Butler Yeats. However, Heaney is much more than simply an Irish poet; he is arguably one of the best living poets of our generation. Seamus Justin Heaney was born at the family cattle farm named Mossbawn, close to Castledawson, in County Derry, on April 13, 1939. Incidentally, this was the year Yeats died. He was the first-born son to Margaret and Patrick Heaney, who were to have eight more children.
