IRISH POET, HARVARD TEACHER SEAMUS HEANEY WINS NOBEL

Author: By Patti Hartigan, Globe Staff

Date: Friday, October 6, 1995
Page: 1
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

In awarding the $1 million prize, the Swedish Academy of Letters cited Heaney for "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past." Heaney, who was touring in Greece yesterday with Harvard colleague Dimitri Hadzi and could not be reached, will receive the award at a ceremony in Stockholm in December.

Born into a Roman Catholic farming family in Northern Ireland, the 56-year- old poet divides his time between homes in Dublin and Cambridge, where he teaches during the spring semester. Sporting a twinkle in his eye and a skip in his step, Heaney is an easily recognizable figure in Cambridge, known equally for the grace of his prose and the warmth of his spirit.

He is the fourth Irish writer to win the prize, following Yeats (1923), George Bernard Shaw (1925) and Samuel Beckett (1969). But unlike the latter two expatriates, Heaney does not embrace alienation and exile: His work is deeply rooted in the soil of his native land, in its mythology, its legends and its terrible beauty. In 14 volumes of poetry and prose, he has celebrated peat bogs and potato diggers, Ulster kings and ordinary farmers, using his ''squat pen" to dig up memories of his ancestral sod.

"I don't think of him writing about alienation or removal or attacking the church," said Adele Dalsimer, co-director of the Irish Studies program at Boston College. "He is all about that Irish part of being wedded to the land, that wonderful sense of rootedness. His ankles are deep in that soil."

In addition to writing evocative nature poetry, Heaney has never shied away
from commenting on the politics that divide his homeland. The work resonates with equal compassion for all the victims of a senseless civil war -- from a fisherman blown up after Bloody Sunday to a cousin shot while driving home.

"As an Irish Catholic, he has concerned himself with analysis of the violence in Northern Ireland -- with the express reservation that he wants to avoid the conventional terms," the academy said in its citation.

Friends and colleagues said yesterday that the literature prize is often linked to the politics of the moment, and the award has an added resonance given the tenuous cease-fire in Northern Ireland.

"He has spoken eloquently about a time in the future when poetry and history rhyme and peace becomes a reality," said Irish consul general Conor O'Riordan.

"There is no getting around that there is a political component to the decision-making," said Jonathan Galassi, editor in chief at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Heaney's New York publisher. "But this has been a long time coming, and it couldn't go to a more popular, beloved person."

A rare writer who has achieved widespread critical acclaim as well as popular appeal since his first volume, "Death of a Naturalist," was published in 1966, Heaney writes poetry that speaks as eloquently to the publicans of the world as to the professors in the ivory tower. "He has a particular sort of genius that even people who are not real readers of poetry can respond to," said friend and essayist Sven Birkerts. "He reactivates the language every time he writes, even if he is just describing a bucket or a path in the woods."

The eloquence of his language matches the grace of his manner, friends said. "Seamus is what they call in Ireland a mensch," said poet Robert Pinsky.

Heaney is the first poet to win the prize since Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott took the award in 1992. "He is a genuinely humble person, and even if he weren't a dear friend, I would be equally pleased that he won," Walcott said from his Brookline home.

His son Michael said that the award was unexpected. "Every year we have been told he is supposed to be coming up for it. It annoyed him and it annoyed us. So when it happened, it was all the better," he said. Heaney and his wife, Marie, have two sons and a daughter.

Described as a gifted storyteller who can spin a yarn as well as the best of them, Heaney is also a private person, who eschews any hint of "famous poet" celebrity. In 1983, he said, "There is a certain mystical glamour, magic, attached to the poet. But he loses it once he begins to talk about
himself."

His friends championed this very unpretentiousness, suggesting that it was fitting that the poet was incommunicado and far removed from the fanfare that always accompanies the prize.

"I'm sure that that is deliberate," Louisa Solano, owner of Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, said of the poet's elusiveness. "He is the personification of poetry and what is good and insightful and conscientious and human."

Describing Heaney as "the greatest Irish poet since Yeats," critic and Harvard professor Helen Vendler said, "It is entirely fitting that Seamus should be in the demesne of Homer when this news arrives. He writes with equal attention to the poetic law and human law."

Heaney, his friends said, would take particular delight in the fact that he was digging around ancient temples when the news arrived. In fact, he has been known to tell a yarn, perhaps apocryphal, about his countryman Samuel Beckett. When Beckett won the prize, Heaney has said, he disappeared for two days and was finally unearthed in a dark saloon by a tenacious reporter. The journalist asked the playwright how he felt about winning the Nobel Prize. According to Heaney's version, Beckett replied, "I'm depressed."

Heaney's own friends and colleagues were anything but dejected. "He is one of our finest poets, not only in the sense of being Irish but also of the world," said longtime friend and scholar Ann Saddlemyer. "I'm overjoyed that this recognition has finally come."

HARTIG;10/05 NIGRO ;10/06,07:26 HEANEY06