With the sixth anniversary of Seamus Heaney’s death approaching, Graham Fawcett reflects on the exhilarating range of Heaney’s achievement over nearly fifty years.

Nobel Prize laureate in 1995 and translator of Beowulf and other poems and plays from the ancient and medieval worlds, Heaney wrote more than twenty books of poetry and criticism. Hailed since his death and before as the finest Irish poet since Yeats, Heaney’s stirring legacy is that of a man whose abiding concern was to sing simply and wonderfully of Ireland, her language and history, and the crafts and customs of a rural heritage past and present and who did not flinch from making the suffering of modern Ireland his poet’s business.