The poet Seamus Heaney has died aged 74. He had recently suffered from ill health, the BBC has reported.
Heaney, who won many awards over the course of his career, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 and the T S Eliot Prize in 2006, is considered by many to be one of the foremost Irish poets of the last century. In 2009, the critic John Sutherland dubbed Heaney “the greatest poet of our age”. Heaney’s work, including poems like “Digging” from the 1966 collection Death of a Naturalist and his translation of Beowulf, is well-known and loved around the world, having appeared on many school exam syllabuses.
Reviewing Heaney’s 2010 collection Human Chain for the New Statesman, Jeremy Noel-Tod wrote that:
Like Cowper, Heaney is a reflective, rural poet, moving easily between man and landscape and finding a moral in any humble object. Again like Cowper, his characteristic style gently ironises poetry’s grand manner with conversational self-consciousness and modest domesticity. Memorable as many of Heaney’s lines are, it is hard to imagine anyone being driven wild by their beauty. It is poetry that “cheers but not inebriates” – as Cowper said of his cup of tea.
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