Seamus Heaney: a Nobel-winning poet with a popular streak Nearly half a century ago, Seamus Heaney's first book, Death of A Naturalist, marked him out as a poet who would make his voice heard in a complex cultural and political landscape. From his Roman Catholic beginnings in rural Ulster, the son of a farmer and cattle dealer and the eldest of nine children would rise to be the bard of Britain and Ireland both, a poet beloved and respected around the world. Heaney, who has died in Dublin aged 74, was that rarest of creatures: a great poet who was also a popular poet. He was, too, a passionate advocate for his art, along with his friend and mentor, the late Ted Hughes. It was Hughes's work that offered proof modern poetry could be made from the matter of rural life. He recalled reading Hughes's "View of a Pig" as a young man. "The poem begins, "The pig lay on a barrow dead./ It weighed, they said, as much as three men." And I thought, "How does he know about all this?" I thought it was completely out of range, and disallowed by its rural nature. Heaney and Hughes together would bring their natural worlds to poetic life and go on to influence generations not just of younger poets but of younger readers, most notably through the two anthologies they edited together, The Rattle Bag (1982) and The School Bag (1987). He published 13 volumes of his own verse: books such as North, Station Island, The Spirit Level, Electric Light and District and Circle are marked by his earthy, lyric signature of a language, which always walked a perfect line between the heightened and the plain. "The poet's dream stole over him like sunlight," he wrote in "Alphabets" (from The Haw Lantern, 1987); that dream stole over his readers, too. His 1995 Nobel Prize for literature was but one of many honours. He was professor of poetry at Oxford and Ralph Waldo Emerson poet in residence at Harvard. In 1998 his translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf won Whitbread Book of the Year - and made this ancient poem perhaps the most unlikely best-seller of modern times. Heaney was born in County Derry on April 13 1939. His father, Patrick, he said, was a reticent man; his mother, Margaret, outspoken: this conflict between speech and silence might, he added, have been behind the "quarrel with himself" that gave rise to his poetry. At Queen's University, Belfast, he studied Latin and Irish as well as Anglo-Saxon, its rough rhythms underlying the volume that arguably made his name: North, published in 1975 in the midst of the Troubles. Here was an artful breaking-through of "The famous/ Northern reticence, the tight gag of place/ And times," as he wrote in "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing." Poems such as "The Grauballe Man" and "Punishment," both of which refer to the ancient, ritually slaughtered bodies found in Danish bogs, cast his country's anguished present against an imagined antique past. After graduating with first-class honours he taught in Belfast and in 1965 he married Marie Devlin, a fellow teacher, who survives him along with two sons and a daughter. He returned to Queen's the following year as a lecturer until his second collection, Wintering Out, was published in 1972. The instinct of the teacher never left him and his temperament was one of generosity, sometimes at a cost: "A friend of mine said to me recently, "You have started to deal with Heaney Inc, and you've been doing it for too long."" But he found it difficult to turn the requests to speak, to offer advice, aside. "I've been in the habit of helping people," he said. Towards the end of his life, he spoke more plainly about the politics of Northern Ireland - for while there had been enormous progress in his lifetime, violence lingered. In January, when street demonstrations followed a vote by councillors to limit the days when the Union flag flew over Belfast City Hall, he said the Loyalists "perceive themselves as almost deserted. And right enough. I think Sinn Féin could have taken it easy. No hurry on flags. Jesus. This was sorrow, not anger, and a clear view of both sides of the centuries-old argument: a mark of this great man. In his last book, Human Chain (2010), there is in the poems that address the stroke he suffered in 2006 a sense of life's fragility. His parents appear - perhaps, he acknowledged in speaking of the work, "because of my own sense of mortality." In the poem that gives the book its title, he wrote of seeing sacks of meal passed by aid workers hand to hand: "Nothing surpassed/ That quick unburdening, backbreak's truest payback,/ A letting go which will not come again./ Or it will, once. And for all. With the poet's death, once for all has come; but the work, like the human chain itself, endures. Share your memories of Seamus Heaney and his poetry by commenting below. What is your favourite poem - or collection - and can you quote your favourite line? Please don't post whole poems for copyright reasons. When did you first encounter Seamus Heaney's works?