Member-only story
When Seamus Heaney’s poetic compass swung North
‘The redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances’. Seamus Heaney
2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the controversial collection North which brought widespread fame for the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, and the 30th anniversary of Heaney being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
For Helen Vendler, professor of English and American literature at Harvard University, North is ‘one of the crucial poetic interventions of the twentieth century’ (Seamus Heaney, 1998), having a key role in the history of modern poetry.
Other critics, however, have complained about Heaney’s stark take on politics and violence, finding as arbitrary his use of graphic images from the distant past as mythopoeic symbols for the brutality and turmoil of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Heaney (1939–2013) was born at the family farm, Mossbawn, in Co Derry, Northern Ireland, the eldest of nine children, the family moving to nearby Bellaghy when he was a teenager. In 1972, the family left Northern Ireland for Co Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland, Heaney then giving up a lectureship in Belfast and starting to write full-time.
