Heaney at 70
This month, Seamus Heaney celebrates his seventieth birthday. The Irish Times commemorates the occasion and his unique contribution to Irish literature.
The Nobel Laureate has not only earned the acclaim of critics, academia and his contemporaries but also the truly deserved affections of a wider and devoted public audience. Our community is fortunate to have a voice of such precision and potency to speak on its behalf when events require expressions of sentiment and thought to "set the darkness echoing".
- Finding the right words in which to speak for us So unerringly has Heaney pitched his responses to Ireland's most intense joys and sorrows that it is easy to forget just how diminished our national discourse would have been without his contribution, writes Dennis O'Driscoll
- From private man to an uneasy witness Heaney first celebrated the natural world which shaped the farming life he was born into, but as he matured he became a nation's chronicler, writes Eileen Battersby
- Landscape, language and history From the beginning of his career, Heaney has mapped out a territory that allowed him represent his heritage and the fissures of a society in conflict, writes Peter Sirr
- Made in America Seamus Heaney never hid his disapproval of the 'centrally heated' day dream of American reality, but the US did offer him a site from which to see the homeplace more clearly, writes Belinda McKeon
- Nourishing young minds Pretty poetry is all very well, but Heaney's tough stuff, the beauty and seriousness of his verse, always strikes home in the classroom, writes Niall MacMonagle
Tributes to Seamus Heaney »
What The Irish Times had to say in 1966
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