SOURCE: "The Matter of Ireland and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney," in Dutch Quarterly Review, Vol. IX, No. 1,1979, pp. 4-23.

In the following excerpt, Zoutenbier traces the thematic and stylistic development of Heaney's verse.

Seamus Heaney was born in Country Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1939, the oldest of nine children; and spent the first fourteen years of his life at Mossbawn, near Lough Neagh in County Derry, where his father was a fanner and cattle dealer. From the primary school at Anahorish, he moved on to St Columb's, a Catholic boarding school in Derry, and then to Queen's University, Belfast, where he read English and where, after working in a Belfast secondary school and in a teacher training college, he returned to teach. In 1972, he gave up teaching for full-time writing, moving with his family to the Irish Republic, to a cottage that was a gate lodge of Glanmore...