Heaney Receives the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Although each of his books of poetry earned him critical acclaim and an ever-larger audience of readers, few could have foreseen Seamus Heaney’s growth from a skillful bard of provincial Irish life to a Nobel laureate who deservingly commands the attention of the world. The fourth Irishman—after William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and Samuel Beckett—to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Heaney is a man whose subtle facility with the art of poetry has led him to make politically important aesthetic judgments.