Poet Seamus Heaney dies aged 74 RIP

Seamus Heaney, acclaimed by many as the best Irish poet since Yeats, has died aged 74.

Heaney was born near Toomebridge, Northern Ireland, but as a child moved to Bellaghy.

He was a teacher and then had a distinguished career in poetry, winning the Nobel prize for literature in 1995.

Heaney had been awarded numerous prizes and received many honours for his work. He recently suffered from ill health.

In 2011, Heaney donated a collection of his literary papers to the National Library of Ireland.

The collection included manuscripts of his poetry, a comprehensive and vast collection of loose-leaf, typescript and manuscript worksheets and bound notebooks.

It spanned Dr Heaney’s literary career, from the publication of his first major collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966), to volumes such as Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975), right through to Station Island (1984), Seeing Things (1991) and his most recent publications, District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010).

It also highlighted his extensive career as a teacher, academic, broadcaster, literary critic and man of letters.

Included were typescripts and manuscript drafts of his prose works and the early drafts of lectures delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry, which were subsequently collected and published in The Redress of Poetry (1995).

All prodigals return, by their very definition; forgotten but not gone, perhaps, just an apparition.

— Seamus Heaney (@ShameonusHeaney) October 8, 2012