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Seamus Heaney was born to Margaret and Patrick Heaney and was the eldest of nine children. He was born at the family farm in Mossbawn, about thirty miles northeast of Belfast. He attended St. Joseph's College in Belfast where he began to write and publish work in the university magazine under the pseudonym Incertus. He also joined a poetry workshop under the guidance of Paul Hobsbaun. He was married to a woman by the name of Marie Delvin. The following year, they had a son named Michael.

Heaney’s works include “Harvest Bow,” “Personal Helicon,” “Song,” “Casualty,” “Bogland,” and quite a few other works. Some of his poetry expresses his fascination of things buried, such as “Bogland,” and “Personal Helicon.” His mother died in 1984, and afterwards, he wrote a poem called “The Haw Lantern,” in which he memorialized her. Shortly afterthe passing of his mother his father died. “Seeing Things,” was published in 1991, and contained many poems about him.

Robert Lowell has deemed him “the most important Irish poet since Yeats.” Some people would agree that Heaney is the most popular poet writing in English today.

His work is filled with images of death and dying, and is also firmly rooted in the life of his world. His tender elegies about loved ones who had passed away serve to not only mourn great losses, but also celebrate those who have gone before us, and recall the memories that still remain with us. Someone asked him about his abiding interest with memorializing the people of his life: he replied “the elegaic Heaney? There’s nothing else.”