Seamus Heaney R.I.P.

Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature and was praised by Robert Lowell as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats," died earlier today, the Telegraph reported. He was 74.

"I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself," Heaney told NPR in 2008. "Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing."

via Shelf Awareness