Irish times obituary seamus heaney biography

FAMOUSLY described by American poet Robert Lowell as “the most important Irish poet since Yeats”, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney was undoubtedly the most popular and widely read living poet until his time of death.

Nicknamed “Famous Seamus” by many of his peers and contemporaries, Heaney’s sales make up two thirds of the market of poetry books in Ireland and the UK, his books continuing to sell in the tens of thousands.

In the context of Irish poetry, the most clear and obvious comparisons with Seamus Heaney have always been those of W.B.

Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh.

As an Irish poet, Heaney occupied the middle ground between Yeats and Kavanagh, combining the intense, sometimes political, lyrics of Yeats with the common touch and landscape portraits of Ireland often found in the work of Kavanagh.

In a wider context, however, the influences that come through most strongly are those of British poet Ted Hughes and American poet Robert Frost.