Seamus Heaney, a Nobel Prize in Literature recipient, has died at 74. He was considered by many to be Ireland's foremost poet.
Heaney died on Friday in a hospital in Dublin, according to his family and publisher, Faber & Faber, The Associated Press said. Seamus Heaney penned numerous works including the 1966 debut "Death of a Naturalist", "The Spirit Level", "District and Circle" and an acclaimed translation of the old English epic poem "Beowulf".
"For us, Seamus Heaney was the keeper of language, our codes, our essence as a people," Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny said. "He belongs with Joyce, Yeats, Shaw and Beckett in the pantheon of our greatest literary exponents."
In a January 2007 article, the BBC noted that Heaney's work constituted "two-thirds of the sales of living poets in Britain."
The late poet was a critic of the sectarian violence that tore apart his homeland, particularly throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Seamus Heaney reportedly viewed the tit-for-tat killing between the Provisional Irish Republican Army and the various Unionist organizations as pointless and destructive, the AP notes.
"There was a sense of an utterly wasteful, cancerous stalemate, and that the violence was unproductive," Heaney said in 2009. "It was villainous, but you were living with it. Only after it stopped did you realize what you had lived with. Day by day, week by week, we lived through this, and didn't fully take in what was going on."
