Heaney was born in County Derry, Northern Ireland, the eldest of 9 children and son of a Catholic farmer. Educated at Queen's College, Belfast, he became a lecturer in English literature at the university in 1966, when he also published his first collection of poems, Death of a Naturalist. The opening lines of the first poem of this acclaimed collection, Digging, prefigure the tension that energises so much of Heaney's work: a tension between art and life, past and present, violent action and peaceful contemplation.Heaney's second book of poems, Door in the Dark, was also well received. The final poem of the collection, Bogland, declared his fascination with the peaty wetlands that are a unique feature of the Irish landscape. In other bog poems, like The Tollund Man and the Bog Queen, these ancient preservers of the past become for Heaney the archaeological links with the violent politics of modern Ireland.
Some critics regard these early bog poems as Heaney's chief legacy, eloquently examining the collective historical conscience, going below the more recent Protestant and Catholic hatreds into primeval Celtic behaviour, "domains of the cold-blooded," where stark evidence of a murderous past has been preserved in the timeless vegetal world of the bogs.
Heaney tackled the Northern Irish political situation openly only in North (1975), a collection which won many prizes and established his reputation with a wider public, but was criticised by some for mythologising the violence in Ulster. He left Northern Ireland with his family for the Republic in 1972, teaching at Dublin from 1975.
In 1984, Station Island was published, his first collection for 5 years, and he was appointed Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. His mother died in that year, and Clearances, a commemorative sonnet sequence in The Haw Lantern (1987), is seen by many as Heaney's most moving work. In 1991, he published Seeing Things, which contains some fine poems for his father, who died in 1987.
From 1989-94, Heaney was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. In 1996, The Spirit Level was published, which explores the idea of centredness, both natural and spiritual. He has also written critical essays, some of which were published in 1980 in Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978. His translations include The Cure at Troy (1991) - a version of Sophocles' Philoctetes - and the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, for which he was awarded the Whitbread Prize in 2000. However, it is generally agreed that his best works are intensely Irish.
