Irish poet Nobel winner Seamus Heaney dies at 74

DUBLIN (AP) - Seamus Heaney, Ireland s foremost poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, died Friday after a half-century exploring the wild beauty of Ireland and the political torment within the nation s soul. He was 74.

Heaney s family and publisher, Faber & Faber, said in a statement that Heaney died in a Dublin hospital. He had been recuperating from a stroke since 2006.

The Northern Ireland-born Heaney was widely considered Ireland s greatest poet since William Butler Yeats. He wrote 13 collections of poetry, two plays, four prose works on the process of poetry, and many other works. Heaney was the third Irishman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, joining Yeats and Samuel Beckett.

Irish President Michael D. Higgins, himself a poet, led a torrent of tributes from political leaders and fellow writers from across the political divides, north and south, Irish Catholic and British Protestant. "The presence of Seamus was a warm one, full of humor, care and courtesy," Higgins said.

" We are blessed to call Seamus Heaney our own and thankful for the gift of him in our national life. ... There are no words to describe adequately our nation s and poetry s grief at the passing of Seamus Heaney," said Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny.

The eldest of nine children, Heaney went to Catholic boarding school in Northern Ireland s second-largest city,

Londonderry, a bitterly divided community that soon became the crucible of "the troubles," the quaint local euphemism for a four-decade conflict over the British territory that has claimed more than 3,700 lives.

Life in 1950s Londonderry, where Catholics outnumbered Protestants two to one but were gerrymandered from power, provided Heaney his first real taste of injustice and ambiguity Irish-style.

His early work was rooted in vivid description of rural experience, but gradually he wedded this to the frictions, deceptions and contradictions rife in his conflicted homeland.

In 1972, the most deadly year of Northern Ireland s conflict, Heaney left his academic post in Queen s University in Belfast to settle in the Republic of Ireland. That year, he published "Wintering Out," a collection of poems that offered only oblique references to the unrest in the north.

His follow-up 1975 collection, "North," captured the Irish imagination with his pitch-perfect sense of the evils of sectarianism.

One of its poems, "Whatever You Say Say Nothing," became a Northern Ireland catch phrase for the art of avoiding identifying one s religion to probing strangers.