Awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, Seamus Heaney was one of the most prolific poets and playwrights of recent times. Born in County Londonderry in Northern Ireland in 1939, in his lifetime he published numerous poetry collections to great critical acclaim, with a fellow Nobel Literature Laureate, Robert Lowell, describing him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats."
Heaney tackles a number of themes in Death of a Naturalist and in his work more broadly, above all those of the history of his family and the history of Northern Ireland. In one of his most famous poems, "Digging," he touchingly explores the similarities between his vocation as a poet and the agricultural...
