The 1916 Centenary Performing Arts Club
Seamus Justin Heaney, (13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) poet, playwright, translator and lecturer. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel committee described as “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.”
Born near Castledawson and Toomebridge, Co. Derry, the family moved to nearby Bellaghy when he was a boy. Heaney became a lecturer at St. Joseph’s College in Belfast in the early 1960s, after attending Queen’s University and began to publish poetry.
He lived in Sandymount, Dublin from 1976 until his death. He also lived part-time in the United States from 1981 to 2006. Heaney was a professor at Harvard from 1981 to 1997, and its Poet in Residence from 1988 to 2006. From 1989 to 1994, he was also the Professor of Poetry at Oxford.
Seamus Heaney is buried at the Cemetery of St. Mary’s Church, Bellaghy, County Derry. The headstone bears the epitaph “Walk on air against your better judgement”.
The poem “Requiem For The Croppies” is about the battle at Vinegar Hill in 1798, where approximately 15,000 Irish rebels, many armed with only pikes, were outgunned by the English.
In his poem Seamus Heaney depicts Vinegar Hill as ‘the final conclave’ where the hopes of the rebels were finally crushed, but his final line shows the barley in the pockets of the dead buried in mass graves growing up out of their pockets, symbolizing that their dreams of independence live on.
