by Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 to a farming family in Mossbawn, County Derry, about 30 miles northwest of Belfast, Ireland. He has written that this rural childhood attuned his ear to the conflicting claims in the sounds of words, as local Irish voices contrasted with “the official idioms” of radio reports from England and that it opened his eyes to the etymology of local place-names and their legendary origins (Heaney, “The Nobel Lecture,” Opened Ground, p. 418). Heaney left Mossbawn in 1951 for college at St. Columb’s in Londonderry and Queen’s University in Belfast, where he would later teach as a member of the English Department. During his time there he published his first two books of poems, The Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969). In 1972, Heaney left this “perfectly agreeable job” in Belfast for a small...