In October 1995, Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, a gesture that recognized the remarkable international appeal of his writing, which originates in that small subsection of Europe called Northern Ireland. Although Heaney, born in 1939, has lived in the Republic of Ireland since 1972, the conflicts in the North (only recently brought to a precarious cease-fire) continue to make up one of the themes of his work- most recently in a sequence called "Mycenae Wavelengths," which will appear in his forthcoming volume The Spirit Level. Yet Heaney's poetry -though it may be best known for its profound meditations on political strife-began with Wordsworthian and Keatsian lyrics about his rural childhood. As his parents' eldest son, Heaney stood to inherit the family farm, and in the first poem of his first book, "Digging," he struggled to reconcile his calling as a writer with his family's expectations. His grandfather dug turf, his father digs potatoes. And himself?

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it

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