Seeing Things

Seamus Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, at Mossbawn, about thirty miles northwest of Belfast, in Northern Ireland. His first book, "Death of a Naturalist," was published in 1966. Heaney is the author of numerous collections of poetry, three volumes of criticism, and "The Cure at Troy, " a version of Sophacles' "Philoctetes." He is a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and held the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1989 to 1994. In 1995 he received the Noble Prize in Literature. A resident of Dublin since 1976, he spends part of each year teaching at Harvard University, where he was elected the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in 1984.