The English war poet Wilfred Owen once wrote, “Celebrity is the last infirmity I desire.” Killed in France at the age of 25, unpublished and unknown, “celebrity” for Owen was a posthumous phenomenon. By contrast, celebrity status for the Irish poet Seamus Heaney – “Famous Seamus” – came early in his life.
The eldest of nine children raised on a small farm called Mossbawn in County Derry – which was so crucial to his imaginative development – his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, was accepted for publication by Faber when he was just 26.
Thirty years later, he became the fourth Irishman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, following Shaw, Yeats and Beckett. By the time of his death in 2013, Heaney’s books accounted for some two-thirds of the sales of contemporary poets in the UK.
