Seamus Heaney, the humble heart-throb of poetry and Nobel Prize winner, dies at 74 His fans adored him, especially women. The most devoted, who followed him round the circuit of literary festivals, were dubbed the "Heaney-Boppers." And with his majestic voice, and the twinkle in his slanting eyes - one friend joked that he looked like a drunken Eskimo - Seamus Heaney was a man who exuded kindness and warmth. But the Nobel Prize-winning poet, who died yesterday aged 74 after a short illness, had a tougher side too. He fought harder than anyone to reverse the decline in how we speak and write English. In an era of text-speak and Americanisms, when schools were busily scrapping rules on grammar, spelling and vocabulary, Heaney taught people to love English by encouraging them to learn its poetry by heart. With Ted Hughes, the future Poet Laureate, he compiled a glorious collection, The Rattle Bag, which since it appeared in 1982 has become the best-loved schoolbook in Britain. His ambition was to collect a panorama of poems that could easily be committed to memory into a single volume. He and Hughes had an infallible instinct for lines that, once read, would never be forgotten. When Education Secretary Michael Gove was widely criticised for saying children should learn poetry by rote, Heaney leapt to his defence. "I believe in people learning poetry by heart - definitely," Heaney said. Most poets have chunks of poetry memorised. Heaney, a Catholic, was born on the family farm in Londonderry in 1939. At 12 he won a scholarship to St Columb's College, a Roman Catholic boarding school, where budding politician John Hume was also a pupil. Both men would go on to win a Nobel Prize; Heaney got his for literature in 1995. While at St Columb's, tragedy struck when Heaney's younger brother, Christopher, was knocked down by a car and killed. Ten years later, in a 1966 collection of his poems, Death Of A Naturalist, Heaney remembered seeing the four-year-old boy's little body in its coffin: "Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple/ He lay in the four foot box as in a cot... A four foot box, a foot for every year. The image is stark and the language is simple. Heaney prided himself on plain poetry that was never pretentious. That didn't always impress his contemporaries, who were writing wild streams of consciousness and hallucinatory blank verse. Heaney was "far from unfathomable," said one critic tartly, as if being unfathomable were a virtue. But Heaney ignored the critics, continuing to write in his own clear, rational style. "In the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties," he admitted, "there was a notion that order and discipline meant you were a dictator in the making and certainly you were supporting [the war in] Vietnam." In fact, said Heaney, "Formal verse is easier. It's freedom. He believed in the power of poetry to change the world. When there's a crisis like 9/11, a bomb or something like that, there is a wish for a language that will help, not comprehension but acceptance or standing up to it. Though Heaney fiercely loved the English language and its history, he didn't take kindly to being called an Englishman. He refused the offer to become Poet Laureate after Hughes died, and responded in furious verse when his work was included in an anthology of British poets. "Be advised, my passport's green/ No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast the Queen," he warned, before signing off, "British, no, the name's not right./ Yours truly, Seamus." He wrote elegies for friends killed in the Troubles but refused to condone the violence, and kept his distance from politics. He once said he had "an early warning system telling me to get back inside my own head" whenever politics was discussed. Though he left the countryside and taught English first in Belfast and then in Dublin as a young man, he did not forget his farming roots. He fondly remembered watching his grandfather cutting turf for peat, and taking a bottle of milk to the old man who would straighten up just long enough to drink it before bending over his spade again. He pictured himself working in the same way, digging out words with the nib of his pen. Unfortunately for his besotted female fans, he was - almost uniquely among poets - a happily married family man. He had two sons and a daughter with his wife Marie. He and Marie met in 1962, and they fell in love during evenings spent with Ted Hughes and his then lover Assia Wevill, drinking "poteen" - home-brewed potato whiskey - and reciting poems, while Marie sang folk songs. Unlike many literary men, Heaney did not enjoy feuds. He was amiable and quick to give praise, which won him friends. Even the notoriously grumpy Hughes was happy to work with him. When Hughes died, Heaney gave the eulogy at Westminster Abbey and said that no death outside his own family had grieved him so deeply. But there was one notable enmity. Heaney disliked the downbeat poetry of Philip Larkin. A poet's job, said Heaney, was to lift up a lyre, or harp, and play music to the gods. Larkin's work, he implied, was more like someone drumming on a kitchen sink. He continued to win over fans until the end of his life. At one recent reading, a young student was heard lamenting, "I love Seamus Heaney! I just want him to give me a hug! With his passion for poetry and his genius for selecting verses we all could learn easily by heart, Heaney gave us much more than the promise of a hug. He restored our love of the English language.