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 first collection of poetry, Death of a Naturalist (1966), led a new generation of Irish poets in civil war—torn Northern Ireland. His poems, which touch on themes of nature and history as well as politics, are among the most celebrated of the century, as Heaney has been hailed as the successor to William Butler Yeats as the most important Irish poet of the later modern era. Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

Major works of poetry by Heaney

Heaney and the Web

Here is a good detailed biography of Heaney, with several links to poems in etext.

This page commemorating Heaney’s Nobel Prizes has links to a biography, his Nobel lecture, some poems by Heaney in etext, and WWW resources.