Death of a Naturalist: What Seamus Heaney Can Teach Us About Compelling Poetry

On Friday, we songwriters and poets lost a legend: the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney died at age 74. 

The New York Times ran a retrospective on Heaney’s life and poetry , recounting Heaney’s rock star status in Ireland, his Nobel prize for poetry, and his masterly craftsmanship. The article recalls that Seamus’s works are “linguistically dazzling,” yet easy to understand.

As songwriters, we can learn a lot from Seamus Heaney.

At its best, Mr. Heaney’s work had both a meditative lyricism and an airy velocity. His lines could embody a dark, marshy melancholy, but as often as not they also communicated the wild onrushing joy of being alive.

The result — work that was finely wrought yet notably straightforward — made Mr. Heaney one of the most widely read poets in the world.

Reviewing Mr. Heaney’s collection “North” in The New York Review of Books in 1976, the Irish poet Richard Murphy wrote: “His original power, which even the sternest critics bow to with respect, is that he can give you the feeling as you read his poems that you are actually doing what they describe. His words not only mean what they say, they sound like their meaning.”

Heaney’s been one of my favorite poets for years. I’m sad to see the man go.

Heaney was thoughtful about his topics—though he wrote about beautiful, pastoral settings, he never forgot the struggles of rural life. He found fascination and beauty in the country for sure, but also strangeness and darkness and troubling questions. As for his choice of words, he was a master hand at finding the music in language; also at using sensory details to draw you deep into his world. Reading Heaney’s poetry, you feel transported to the places he writes about. You experience it all firsthand.

If you want to fall in love with the written and spoken word all over again, take three minutes to read “Digging” by Seamus Heaney.

If that first taste of the fellow’s work strikes you the way it struck me, you may want to check out Heaney’s Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996.

So this weekend I’m wishing Seamus Heaney a sad farewell—and saying thank you, Seamus, for a lifetime of amazing poetry.