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Heaney was born, the eldest of nine children, on a farm called Mossbawn, in County Derry thirty miles to the Northwest of Belfast, in Northern Ireland. He was brought up a Catholic. As a child he remembered watching American soldiers practising for the D-Day landings. The family left the farm in 1953. He was educated at the local primary school and St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school in Derry to which he was awarded a scholarship. At St Columbs he was taught the Irish language. He then attended Queen's University, Belfast.
In the sixties Heaney trained as a teacher and worked in schools in Belfast and Ballymurphy. It was at this time that he first started to publish poetry, beginning in 1962. His first book, Death of a Naturalist, was published in 1966. It met with much critical acclaim. In 1965 he met and married Marie Devlin. (Devlin is a writer herself and in 1994 published Over Nine Waves a collection of traditional Irish myths and legends.) They had three children.
Throughout the sixties, he was working, at formal meetings, with a number of writers including Michael Longley , Derek Mahon , and Philip Hobsbaum . In the seventies younger poets attended these meetings, now run by Heaney, including Paul Muldoon and Frank Ormsby . In 1968, with Michael Longley, Heaney took part in a reading tour called 'Room to Rhyme', this lead to quite a lot of exposure for the poets work. He was appointed to the Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland in 1974. He became an elected Saoi of Aosdána. In 1972 Heaney left his lectureship at Belfast and moved to the Irish republic, working at a teacher training college in Dublin. In 1984, Heaney was appointed Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, at Harvard University. In 1989, he was elected to be Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, which he held for a five-year term to 1994 (not requiring residence in Oxford).
Throughout this time he was publishing prolifically and dividing his time between Ireland and America. He also continued to give public readings, which were very popular. So well attended and keenly anticipated were these events that those who queued for tickets with such enthusiasm have sometimes been dubbed 'Heaneyboppers' suggesting an almost pop-music fanaticism on the part of his supporters.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.
His work often deals with "the local"—that is, his surroundings and everything inclusive of them. Inevitably this means Ireland, and particularly Northern Ireland. Hints of sectarian violence, which began just as his writing career did, can be found in many of his poems, even works that on the surface appear to deal with something else. Despite his many travels much of his work appears to be set in rural Derry, the county of his childhood. Like the troubles themselves, Heaney's work is deeply associated with the lessons of history, sometimes even prehistory. Many of his works concern his own family history and focus on characters in his own family, they can be read as elegies for those family members. He has acknowledged this trend.
The use of Anglo-Saxon influences in his work is also noteworthy, his university study of the language had a profound effect on his work. It also led to a small revival of interest in the verse forms of Anglo-Saxon poetry amongst a number of poets influenced by Heaney. He has also written critically well regarded essays and one play. His essays, among other things, have been credited with beginning the critical re-examination of Thomas HardyThis article is about the British novelist. For other people with the same name, please see Thomas Hardy (disambiguation). Thomas Masterson Hardy ( 2 June, 1840 11 January, 1928) was a novelist and poet, generally regarded as one of the greatest figures i. His anthologies (edited with friend Ted HughesEdward James Hughes ( August 17, 1930 in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire October 28, 1998) was an English poet. Hughes studied English, anthropology and archaeology at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he met Sylvia Plath. They married on June 16, 1956, sepa) The Rattle Bag and The School Bag are used extensively in schools in the UK and elsewhere.
In addition to his original works, Heaney has published translations, including a verse translation of BeowulfThis article describes Beowulf the epic poem. For the person Beowulf see Beowulf (hero For other uses, see Beowulf (disambiguation . Beowulf is a traditional heroic epic poem in Old English alliterative verse. At 3182 lines, it is far more substantial tha from Old English in 1999, and Sophocles' AntigoneAntigone is a tragedy written in 442 BC by Sophocles. It is chronologically the third of the three Theban plays, but was written first. The heroine, Antigone, opens the play attempting to defy the tyrant Creon's orders that her brother Polynices lie unbur in 2004.
His influence on contemporary poetry is reckoned to be immense and few poets working today would not mention him as an influence. Robert LowellRobert Lowell ( March 1, 1917 September 12, 1977), born Robert Traill Spence Lowell, Jr. was an American poet known for inspiring and teaching several literary superstars of the 1950s and 1960s, including Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. He was part of the B has called Heaney "the most important Irish poet since Yeats." A good many others have echoed the sentiment. His influence is not restricted to Ireland but is felt world wide. However some critics have attacked Heaney for not dealing more directly with the political situation in Northern Ireland. His Nobel Prize nomination ran "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."