North

When Seamus Heaney died in 2013, he was among the world’s best-known poets. Heaney’s work—including “North”—centers on his attempts to grapple with his Irish heritage and cultural past. Nevertheless, his voice reaches beyond these local concerns to a global audience. Though Heaney’s works share aspects with those of modernist poets like T.S. Eliot, his use of simple language and uncomplicated poetic forms sets him apart from this earlier movement. Instead of the abstraction and obscuration that many modernists aim towards, Heaney reveals simple connections that have previously gone unnoticed.

“North,” published in the 1975 collection of the same name, is a strong example of Heaney’s ability to navigate connections between the present and the past. North is one of Heaney’s more controversial collections, despite the titular poem’s strength and popularity. The poem, told in a series of unrhymed quatrains, takes an approach similar to Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in letting resonances, images, representations of the past to coexist with the speaker’s present experience. While Eliot’s poem focuses on the mind, however, Heaney’s “North” focuses on the body and its connection to place.

Poet Biography

Seamus Heaney was born April 13, 1939, in Tamniaran, near Castledawson, Northern Ireland.