The Times obituary: Seamus Heaney Nobel Prize-winning writer and the foremost poet in the English language, whose collections were acclaimed, enjoyed and memorised worldwide

Genius liberates. It also intimidates. Long after his death in 1939, W. B. Yeats continued to cast a shadow over the development of poetry in Ireland. Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas Kinsella, Austin Clarke, John Montague, John Hewitt and Eavan Boland were among those who fought to break free. None, it was felt, could be mentioned in the same breath as Yeats, who was to Irish poets of the postwar era what Shakespeare has always been to English playwrights — nonpareil.

The shadow finally lifted one day in May 1966 with the publication by Faber & Faber of the first collection by 27-year-old Seamus Heaney, a farmer’s son from Co Derry. Released, as Larkin might have observed, between the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising and the Beatles’ seventh LP, Death of a Naturalist was a literary sensation.

The Ulsterman’s deceptively simple pastoral verse proved both a counterpoint to the strident immediacy of pop music and an inspiration to his fellow poets, drawing thousands of young people back to the written word.

From the outset, Heaney’s poems were rooted, earthbound, tactile, crafty, respectful of ritual and of manual skills. Digging described his father and grandfather’s adeptness at turning the turf, and struck a typical note of self-deprecation — and a pride in his own implement:

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.

The impact of the collection was felt not only in Belfast, where Heaney was teaching, and in London, where Faber & Faber presented its new signing as a new-found “master”, but throughout the literary world. Post-Yeats but pre-Heaney, Ireland was a middle-ranking poetic power. With Heaney, it dominated the landscape.

Many have commented on the fact that as his native Northern Ireland was increasingly convulsed by political and religious violence, Heaney, a Catholic, remained true to his calling, refusing to become a poster boy for the nationalist cause or a Republican pamphleteer.

This should not suggest that, like Yeats before him, he was unmoved by the death and destruction through which he was living. For years, it seemed, he had lived in dread of what was coming. In the title poem of his first collection, he recalled how as a child he loved the frogs that gathered around the flax ponds near his home. But then one day the mood changed. The angry frogs invaded the flax dam.

I ducked through hedges To a coarse croaking that I had not heard Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus. Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped: The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.

I sickened, turned and ran. The great slime kings Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

Heaney did not dip his hand. Instead, he left Belfast and fled to Wicklow to perfect his art. But he could not escape his inheritance entirely. Requiem for the Croppies, from Door Into the Dark (1969), recalls the bloody defeat by the British of a band of insurrectionists in Wicklow in 1798. Lyrically, in full awareness of the power of his message, the poet confronts the resilience and romanticism of the Irish struggle. The “Croppies” — poor sharecroppers risen in support of Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen — had embarked on their doomed campaign with barley in the pockets of their greatcoats with which to feed themselves on the run. Then, as the Redcoats responded, came the “final conclave”.

Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon. The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave. They buried us without shroud or coffin And in August . . . the barley grew up out of our grave.

The many collections that he published after Death of a Naturalist, including Wintering Out (1972), North (1975), Field Work (1979) The Haw Lantern (1987), The Spirit Level (1996), Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010), were acclaimed by critics and the general public alike. Poems such as Mid-Term Break, Punishment, Mossbawn Sunlight, The Tollund Man and Poet’s Chair became classics, anthologised in a dozen languages, admired by critics, on school curriculums from Belfast to Boston and from Liverpool to Lyons. It is said that it once took him three hours to walk down Dublin’s main street because so many people stopped him to get his autograph.

Soft-spoken, with famously twinkling eyes, Heaney was a formidable critic and scholar, whose translation of Beowulf became a worldwide bestseller. He was also a teacher, for five years Professor of Poetry at Oxford and over several decades a visiting professor at Berkeley and Harvard.

The award of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature conferred formal recognition of what had been apparent for years, sometimes to the consternation of his rivals. Academicians praised the Derry man for creating “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past”. Heaney — Famous Seamus — had become quite simply the best known poet in the world. In Ireland he was regarded as a national treasure.

In 1998 he wrote of the death of his great friend Ted Hughes: “No death outside my immediate family has left me feeling more bereft. No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more. He was a tower of tenderness and strength, a great arch under which the least of poetry’s children could enter and feel secure. His creative powers were, as Shakespeare said, still crescent. By his death, the veil of poetry is rent and the walls of learning broken.”

Seamus Justin Heaney was born in April 1939, less than three months after the death of Yeats (who had been winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923). He was the eldest of nine children born to Patrick Heaney, a small farmer and cattle dealer, and his wife, Margaret, née McCann. Heaney Sr was hardworking and laconic; his mother outgoing and opinionated. Out of their qualities, their son would recall, came the quarrel with himself that fed his poetry.

Mossbawn itself is a marshy townland halfway between Belfast and Londonderry. More to the point, it sits halfway between the nationalist village of Toome, famous in song as the place where the rebel Roddy McCorley was hanged, and Castledawson, dominated by the Big House of the Chichester-Clarks, one of the last Ascendancy families to wield real power in Ireland.

Growing up in this microcosm of the Northern divide, Heaney was well aware of the faultlines of Irish society. His own large family was nationalist- inclined but politically neutral, reflecting the fact that in the 1940s and 1950s there was little opportunity for Catholics to assert themselves with any hope of success. The future poet, however, like his parents, did not have a bitter disposition, and he grew up largely without enemies.

What changed everything — beyond the fact that his aunt Sarah had instilled in him a love of reading — was the award in 1951, when he was 12, of a scholarship to St Columb’s College, a leading Catholic boarding school in Derry City.

At St Columb’s the young Heaney found himself studying Latin, modern languages, Irish history, Gaelic, religion and English, as well as mathematics and the sciences. Fellow alumni include John Hume — joint winner of the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize — the novelist and critic Seamus Deane, the footballer Martin O’Neill, the political activist and journalist Eamonn McCann and the playwright Brian Friel.

From St Columb’s Heaney might well have progressed to St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, or University College Dublin. Instead, he opted for Queen’s University Belfast, a majority of whose students at the time were Protestant and Unionist. Professor John Braidwood, a Scot, introduced him to Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, joining him to a train of thought that linked the bogs of Ireland to the bogs of Denmark — the source material for his celebrated Tollund Man sequence of poems — and ultimately to Beowulf.

He started to write poetry seriously after graduating with first-class honours in 1961, and within a year, while pursuing a teaching qualification at St Joseph’s College, began to be published in local journals, most obviously The Honest Ulsterman, edited by James Simmons. St Joseph’s was impressed and offered him a teaching position. Switching to the English department at Queen’s in 1966, he was persuaded by the English poet Philip Hobsbaum to join what became known as “The Group,” a gathering of young poets that included Derek Mahon and Michael Longley.

Much has been written over the decades about The Group. The conventional wisdom is that Heaney was admired but resented for his success — a fact later confirmed by Longley. What is beyond dispute is that with the Derry man as their figurehead, the Belfast poets prospered, acquiring admirers across Europe and North America.

Belfast, though, was no place for a poet whose mandate clearly transcended provincial squabbles, especially as the political violence began to intensify.

In 1970 he accepted an invitation from Berkeley to be a visiting professor and hugely enjoyed the experience. Not long after his return to Queen’s he resigned his lectureship and embarked on a peripatetic academic career that would be crowned by his appointment in 1984 as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard.

Heaney moved easily between teaching, research and writing, winning numerous awards along the way. He even found time to compile, with Ted Hughes, two anthologies, The Rattle Bag and The School Bag, that probably introduced more young people to poetry than any collection since the Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in 1900.

Thematically, Heaney in the 1980s drifted away from Mossbawn, becoming markedly more abstruse and classically referential, putting at risk his gift of the common touch. Yet in this mature phase, affected by his growing awareness of civilisations and literatures across time and space, he was still capable of producing masterpieces.

Poet’s Chair, from his 1996 collection The Spirit Level, was universally acclaimed, reaching back to his earliest influences while acknowledging his inevitable transformation.

My father’s ploughing one, two, three, four sides Of the lea ground where I sit all-seeing At centre field, my back to the thorn tree They never cut. The horses are all hoof And burnished flank, I am all foreknowledge. Of the poem as a ploughshare that turns time Up and over. Of the chair in leaf

The fairy thorn is entering for the future. Of being here for good in every sense.

Heaney, like Yeats, had a keen appreciation of himself as a public man, ready to give a speech, lead a discourse, or simply adorn a grand occasion. He certainly did not lack a sense of his own importance. He was not stuffy or pompous, however, and never took himself more seriously than the situation demanded.

He told the story of when he was staying at the home in Ludlow of one of his dearest friends, the academic Bernard McCabe. A taxi driver turned up to take Heaney to Shrewsbury, where he was due to deliver a lecture. The driver, a local man, looked at the shaggy-haired Irishman. “Who are you, anyway,” he asked. “Some sort of poet?”

“That’s right,” Heaney answered, “some sort of poet.”

Heaney and McCabe had become friends in Massachusetts in the 1970s and had kept in close contact. McCabe, remembered in Heaney’s poem The Birch Grove, told the story of how, in his retirement, they once holidayed in Rome and chanced upon a bar called The Seamus Heaney.

“What would you do if Seamus Heaney himself walked into your bar?” McCabe, an Italian speaker, asked the barman.

“I suppose I’d buy him a drink.”

“Well, then,” said McCabe, “set them up — for here he is.”

The singer and documentary film-maker David Hammond, whose favourite retreat was a house overlooking the sea in Co Donegal, was another close friend. His refusal to play his guitar after news came through of a particularly brutal political murder yielded The Singer’s House, one of Heaney’s most enduringly popular poems.

People here used to believe that drowned souls lived in the seals. At spring tides they might change shape. They loved music and swam in for a singer who might stand at the end of summer in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed, his shoulder to the jamb, his song a rowboat far out in evening. When I came here first you were always singing, a hint of the clip of the pick in your winnowing climb and attack. Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.

Heaney’s life was greatly blessed by his long marriage to Marie Devlin, the sister of the author and broadcaster Polly Devlin. A native of Ardboe, Co Tyrone, Devlin was a young schoolteacher and an authority on Irish myth and legend. They married in 1965 and had two sons and a daughter. If any one person kept Heaney’s feet on the ground, it was his wife — as he regularly acknowledged. She was also his constant inspiration and most valued critic.

In later life, having survived a stroke, Heaney found himself ever more in demand from academics and “Heaneyboppers”. There was still time though for academic projects, including The Burial at Thebes, a version of Sophocles’s Antigone, later turned into an opera directed by his fellow Nobel laureate and poet Derek Walcott. The gala performance at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London turned out to be only the seventh opera Heaney had ever attended. It was nice, Walcott confessed, to have arias that contained more than, “I love you, I love you ... never leave me.”

There are critics who argue that Heaney’s best work was behind him as the hands of the millennium clock advanced towards the new century. While the American poet Robert Lowell dubbed him “the greatest Irish poet since Yeats” and John Carey said he was “the one undoubtedly major poet in the English-speaking world”, back home the begrudgers were moving out of the woodwork.

In one clamorous pamphlet, the Irish essayist and critic Desmond Fennell condemned what he called Heaney’s “Anglo-American” turn of mind. The poet was good, said Fennell, but not that good, and he drowned out other voices.

If the criticism stung, Heaney did not complain. He let his poems speak for him, written either in his house in Sandymount, south Dublin, not far from Joyce’s Martello Tower, or else in his second home in the Wicklow Hills, where for years he was unreachable by any means other than fax.

The only time he publicly bridled at the assumption of others was in 1982 when Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion included him in the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Verse.

“Be advised!” came the retort. “My passport’s green. No glass of ours was ever raised to toast the Queen.”

In 1995, during a visit to Londonderry, President Clinton chose a stanza from Heaney’s play The Cure at Troy in support of his Irish peace initiative:

History says, don’t hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme.

Hope and History would subsequently be the title of Clinton’s memoir of his involvement in the Troubles.

Heaney’s health had been failing for some years. His 2010 collection Human Chain was written after he suffered a stroke. Its central poem, Miracle, was directly inspired by his illness and his faltering recovery.

Heaney is survived by his wife, Marie, and his two sons and daughter.