Celebrate Heaney

While the staff of the Irish Examiner wishes to join with the family of Seamus Heaney in mourning his passing, it is also important that he should be celebrated as one of the world’s greatest men of letters.

The American poet Robert Lowell has called him “the most important Irish poet since Yeats”. Born in Co Derry a little over two months after the death of William Butler Yeats, Heaney helped enormously to foster Ireland’s international renown in the area of literature.

At the Irish Book Awards a couple of years ago, President Michael D Higgins characterised Mr Heaney as a man who understood the Irish people and their history. “By delving into the images and memories of a rural Irish childhood, he weaves a journey back to our future selves,” the President said.

Before turning to professional poetry, Mr Heaney was a teacher, and in later years he returned to teaching at the highest levels, with prestigious professorships at both the universities of Harvard and Oxford. He won many international distinctions for his writings, especially in the field of poetry.

In 1995, he joined other distinguished Irish writers such as Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and Samuel Beckett in winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

For such a small country to have produced so many illustrious writers is a feat of which we should be justifiably proud, and we are particularly proud to call Seamus Heaney one of our own.