Critically respond to Seamus Heaney's life and works.
Ans.Seamus Heaney, a renowned playwright, poet and translator was born on April 13, 1939 in Ireland. He is widely recognised as one of the major poets of the 20th century. His father owned and worked a small farm of some fifty acres in County Derry in Northern Ireland, but the father's real commitment was to cattle-dealing. There was something very congenial to Patrick Heaney about the cattle-dealer's way of life to which he was introduced by the uncles who had cared for him after the early death of his own parents. The poet's mother came from a family called McCann whose connections were more with the modern world than with the traditional rural economy; her uncles and relations were employed in the local linen mill and an aunt had worked "in service" to the mill owners' family. Heaney grew up as a country boy and attended the local primary school.
As a very young child, he watched American soldiers on manoeuyres in the local fields, in preparation for the Normandy invasion of 1944. When he was twelve years of age, Seamus Heaney won a scholarship to St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school situated in the city of Derry, forty miles away from the home farm, and this first departure from Mossbawn was the decisive one. It would be followed in years to come by a transfer to Belfast where he lived between 1957 and 1972 and by another move from Belfast to the Irish Republic where Heaney has made his home and then, since 1982, by regular, annual periods of teaching in America.
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