Seamus heaney early life

Early life

Seamus Heaney was born on 13 April, 1939 in rural County Derry, in Northern Ireland. He was the eldest of nine children born to Patrick Heaney, a cattle farmer, and Margaret McCann, and grew up on the family farm of Mossbawn.

Heaney’s childhood was a peaceful and simple one: in his Nobel lecture, he called it ‘an intimate, physical, creaturely existence… in suspension between the archaic and the modern’. The people, landscapes and memories of his upbringing would inform his poetry throughout his life.

In Stepping Stones, Dennis O’Driscoll’s 2008 book of interviews with Heaney, he describes the rhythms of life in Mossbawn in vivid detail – the churning of butter, gathering of rainwater and other long disappeared rituals of rural life.

He also talks about growing up Catholic in the days before the violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and how this informed daily interactions and his later worldview.

In 1953, Heaney’s second youngest brother Ch