Watch: a montage of seamus heaney reading 'digging'

Irish poet Seamus Heaney, a Nobel Prize winner who published more than a dozen major poetry collections and translations over the course of his lifetime, died on Friday. He was 74. Though

his voice and subject matter were both unmistakably Irish, Heaney was one of the most famed and beloved poets the world over. His fellow poet, Robert Lowell, dubbed him "the most

important Irish poet since Yeats," and it would be shorter to list the major poetry awards he _didn't_ win than to recite the ones he did. But Heaney remained characteristically

humble and generous; as his health declined in 2011, he personally packed up his collection of literary papers, which are estimated to be worth millions, and donated them to the National

Library of Ireland in Dublin. SUBSCRIBE TO THE WEEK Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives. SUBSCRIBE & SAVE SIGN UP FOR THE

WEEK'S FREE NEWSLETTERS From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. From our morning news briefing to a

weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. In 2009, the BBC Northern Ireland cut together this montage of Heaney reading "Digging," one

of his earliest acclaimed poems, at a series of appearances throughout his lifetime. "Digging" was included in Heaney's first major collection, 1966's widely acclaimed

_Death of a Naturalist_, which offers 34 poems about growing up on a farm in Northern Ireland. "His words give us the soil-reek of Ireland, the colorful violence of a childhood farm in

Derry," said a critic in _The Spectator_ at the time. A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com