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Seamus Heaney, "Mid-Term Break"

BIOGRAPHY

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[From The Norton Introduction to Literature]

(b. 1939)

Seamus Heaney, whose poems explore themes of rural life, memory, and history, was born on a farm in Mossbawn, County Derry (Castledawson, Londonderry), Northern Ireland. Educated at Queen's University in Belfast, he has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Carysfort College in Dublin, and Oxford University; he currently teaches at Harvard. Once called by Robert Lowell “the most important Irish poet since Yeats,” Heaney received the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature. His poetry collections include Eleven Poems (1965), Death of a Naturalist (1966), Wintering Out (1972), The Haw Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996), and Electric Light (2001). Heaney's translation of Beowulf (2000) from Anglo-Saxon into modern English gave new life to the oldest of English poems; it not only won Britain's prestigious Whitbread Award but also become a bestseller.

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