Heaney Wins T. S. Eliot Prize

The Irish Independent announces that poet Seamus Haney has been awarded the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize of €15,000, about $20,000 US. The prize was presented by Eliot’s widow, Valerie, January 15, 2007, at a ceremony in London.

Heaney’s poetry collection District and Circle beat out competitors Simon Armitage and Paul Muldoon. The chair of this year’s judges panel, Sean O’Brien, said of Heaney’s collection, "Seamus Heaney's 'District and Circle' is a commanding, exhilarating work. In an outstandingly strong field, this was an exceptional collection of poems."

Heaney did not attend the ceremony, because he has been experiencing poor health, so poet Bernard O’Donoghue read some of Heaney’s poems. District and Circle brings Heaney’s poetry publications to an even dozen.

About Heaney’s most recent collection, Poet Laureate Andrew Motion concluded that these poems exude "the undiminished freshness of his response to time-honoured things.” The New York Times claimed that District and Circle "brims with lovely evocations, reconstructions, restorations."

Sion Hamilton, poetry buyer at Foyles bookshop, gave some insight about the importance of this prize: "The TS Eliot prize has become a highly prestigious literary award. It seems almost incredible that Heaney has never won before. Winning the prize really affirms a poet's standing. Even though it is awarded to a particular title, it reflects on all the hard work the poet has put in over the years."

Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, and twice he has been awarded Whitbread Book of the Year Award: first for his collection The Spirit Level and for his translation of Beowulf. He was a finalist for the T .S. Eliot award in 2001 for his book, Electric Light.

Heaney was born to a Roman Catholic family on April 13, 1939, in Northern Ireland at Mossbawn, his family’s farmhouse, northwest of Belfast. He is the oldest of nine siblings. While attending a boarding school in Derry, Heaney’s four-year-old brother was killed in a car crash. The following is one of two poems Heaney wrote on this subject:

Mid-Term Break

• I sat all morning in the college sick bay
• Counting bells knelling classes to a close,
• At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

• In the porch I met my father crying—
• He had always taken funerals in his stride—
• And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

• The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
• When I came in, and I was embarrassed
• By old men standing up to shake my hand

• And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
• Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
• Away at school, as my mother held my hand

• In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
• At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
• With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

• Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
• And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
• For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

• Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple,
• He lay in the four foot box as in a cot.
• No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

• A four foot box, a foot for every year.

This poem demonstrates the power of Heaney’s work, even better than all the prizes his has won and continues to win. The poet has also been honored with numerous professorships, and in 1984, he was offered the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University.

From 1989 and 1994 he served a poetry professor at Oxford, and then again at Harvard in 1997 he was honored with the position, Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence.

Between stints at universities, Seamus Heaney lives in Dublin.

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