Northern Irish poet, critic, and translator — the most widely loved Anglophone poet of the late 20th century and, with Yeats, the second Irish poet to win the Nobel Prize (1995). Heaney was born on a County Derry farm into a Catholic family in what was still the unreformed sectarian state of Northern Ireland; his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), made the physical world of that farm — bog and byre, turf and well — into a poetic ground he never entirely left.
The eruption of the Troubles in 1969 forced on him the question — which he worried through every subsequent book — of what a poet writing in the English lyric tradition owed to a divided community in active political violence. North (1975), the great book of that reckoning, finds in the preserved Iron Age bog bodies of Jutland an image-rhyme for contemporary sectarian killing; Field Work (1979) mourns friends and kin killed in the violence; Station Island (1984) stages an explicit poetic self-reckoning in the form of a Dantean pilgrimage.
The later books (The Haw Lantern, 1987; Seeing Things, 1991; The Spirit Level, 1996; Electric Light, 2001; Human Chain, 2010) moved into lighter, more translucent air. His verse translation of Beowulf (1999) became a bestseller and, unusually, a genuine re-opening of the poem. His Oxford lectures The Redress of Poetry (1995) and the essays in Preoccupations (1980) and Finders Keepers (2002) are criticism of an unusually generous, concrete kind.