The Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, who has died aged 74, was described by Robert Lowell as \u201cthe most important Irish poet since Yeats\u201d\u009d. Widely acclaimed for his many notable achievements, he was undoubtedly the most popular poet writing in English, and the only one assured of a place in the bestseller lists. His books sold, and continue to sell, in the tens of thousands, while hordes of \u201cHeaneyboppers\u201d\u009d flocked to his readings. His earliest influences, Robert Frost and Ted Hughes, are reflected throughout his work, but most especially in his first two collections, where he recollected images of his childhood on the family farm in Co Derry. Other poets, especially Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy, as well as Dante, also influenced his work….<\/p>\n
[About him] the critic Helen Vendler wrote: \u201cSeamus broadened my view of Ireland, north and south \u201d\u201c its geography, its history, its labour, its sounds, its euphemisms, its crises of conscience, its bog bodies, its bombs, its weather, its sectarian stand-offs, its twilights.\u201d\u009d Poet and critic Robert Pinsky praised Heaney\u2019s \u201cgift for laughter and for friendship, a generosity entirely congruent with the qualities of his great gift and accomplishment in art\u201d\u009d.<\/p>\n