Seamus Heaney ( )

Born in a Roman Catholic Family in Ulster He lived on a farm on the border with the Irish Republic He went to Queen’s University in Protestant Belfast In 1972 he settled in the Irish Republic Since 1976 he has lived and taught in Dublin In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature His Life

Death of a Naturalist (1966) Door into the Dark (1969) Heaney describes the Irish landscape of his youth. He describes the relationship of language, place and race in Ireland. Digging (1966) Early Collections

Wintering Out (1972) North (1975) Field Work (1979) Station Island (1984) Seeing Things (1991) The Spirit Level (1996) Electric Light (2001) District and Circle (2006) Human Chain (2010) He continues to explore history and place, but also language, as a living entity. Later Collections

Like all Irish writers he has to come to terms with the English language. Words have an energy which must be liberated. His language is rich and simple. It also exploits rhythmical and phonetic possibilities. Heaney’s Language

The poet’s pen is resting between his fingers Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests The sound of the poet’s father digging in the garden takes the poet back some twenty years Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging […] Just like his old man. Digging (1966)

The movements, sounds, smells of the past come alive for the poet. He has no spade  only his pen. He will dig with that Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it. The pen has become a link with the poet’s racial and cultural heritage  it unites the past and present. Past and Present

The poem’s description of the man makes a typical Irishman come wonderfully alive: different ways of calling for rum or beer at the pub; his mannerisms; his rituals with his pipe and tobacco. The language is full of compressed colloquial or everyday phrases: a quick stout a discreet dumb-show pulling off the top a tobacco plug Casualty (1972)

The poem exposes the hatred and the violence of the Troubles in all their cruelty. The last three lines are an epitaph: That Wednesday Everybody held His breath and trembled. The death of a man is registered as just another casualty. The Troubles