Seamus Heaney (b. 1939) was born and raised in Northern Ireland, an area torn for decades by political, religious, and civil strife. He was educated at Queens College, Belfast, where he later taught. His poems are rooted in both the culture of his native Northern Ireland and in his own life experiences, and many of them touch on themes of nature, history, and politics. Hailed as the contemporary successor to the tradition of William Butler Yeats, Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

Major works of poetry by Heaney

Death of a Naturalist (1966)
Door into the Dark (1969)
Wintering Out (1972)
North (1975)
Selected Poems 1965-1975 (1980)
Sweeney Astray (1984)
Station Island (1984)
The Haw Lantern (1987)
New Selected Poems 1966-1987 (1990)
Seeing Things (1991)
Electric Light (2001)

Heaney and the Web

This detailed biography of Heaney includes links to Heaney reading from several of his poems, including "The Tollund Man."

This page provides the complete text of Heaney's Nobel lecture, which he delivered in Stockholm in 1995 upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature.