Ralph Waldo Emerson professor of poetry at Harvard University, from 1998 to 2006.
Irish poet Seamus Heaney Seamus Heaney, Ireland's beloved who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, has died in a Dublin hospital at the age of 74, according to his publisher, Faber & Faber.
Heaney was the Ralph Waldo Emerson professor of poetry at Harvard University, from 1998 to 2006. He gave a reading at UMass-Amherst in 2000. He was the author of 13 volumes of poetry, including "Death of a Naturalist, as well as two plays and other works. Among his most famous works is his one-of-a-kind translation of the landmark eighth-century poem "Beowulf," published in 2000. He was member of Aosdana, the National Irish Arts Council.
His work reflected both the rural life he knew as a young boy as well as Ireland's sectarian troubles. His poem, “Requiem for the Croppies,” paid tribute to the Irish rebles of 1798 and was publish on the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising.
When President John F. Kennedy made his historic visit to Ireland in 1963, the speakers included Heaney.
He had had a stroke in 2006.
Heaney, born on the family farm in Northern Ireland, the first of nine child in Northern Ireland, was the third Irishman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, joining Yeats and Samuel Beckett. He learned both Irish and Latin at a Catholic boarding school in Northern Ireland. He went on to graduate with a first class honors degree from Queens University in Belfast.
" We are blessed to call Seamus Heaney our own and thankful for the gift of him in our national life. ... There are no words to describe adequately our nation's and poetry's grief at the passing of Seamus Heaney," said Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny of Heaney's death.
Among his fans on this side of the Atlantic is U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-Springfield, who often quoted him his speeches and writing.
In selected Heaney, the Nobel committe said he produced "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past"