Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize winner and Irish poet, has died. Scroll down for an example of his poetry.

Seamus Heaney died in Dublin on Friday after an illness at 74, according to a statement from his family.

Heaney won the Nobel Prize in 1995. He was born in Londonderry, Northern Ireland on his family farm, Mossbawn. The eldest of nine children, he chose to live in Dublin.

His poems were imbued by an Irish spirit that celebrated the natural world in clear, plain-spoken language. They addressed sectarian violence in Ireland and the images of his childhood, such as digging for potatoes or peat.

Heaney published more than a dozen books of poems between 1966 and 2010 and was widely celebrated for his translations and essays.

Robert Lowell described him as the "most important Irish poet since Yeats."

Heaney rose to fame with "Death of a Naturalist".

Heaney's parents were not literary-his father, a cattle-dealer and farmer, was suspicious of literature-- but his mother would "recite lists of affixes and suffixes, and Latin roots, with their English meanings, rhymes that formed part of her early schooling in the early part of the century."

He was sent on a scholarship to St Columb's College in Derry at the age of 12 and later got a degree in English at Queen's University in Belfast. He later taught and lectured, eventually becoming a full-time writer.

Heaney's exposure to strife between Catholics and Protestants may have eventually lead to rich material for his work. Michael Parker wrote that, "It could be argued that while Heaney's exposure to what he now regards as 'cultural colonialism' may have bred feelings of inferiority and insecurity in the short term, in the long term it also honed his sense of identity and provided him with sustenance from two rich traditions."

Seamus Heaney eventually went on to win the Nobel Prize and become a highly successful poet.

By some estimates, Heaney was one of the most-read poems in the world in recent decades. An editorial for the Irish Times said of him,

"Book sales may not mean much in the areas of fiction or biography, but for a poet to sell in the thousands is remarkable proof to his ability to speak in his poems to what are inadequately called 'ordinary people.' Yet the popularity of his work should not be allowed to obscure the fact that this deep, at times profound poetry, forged through hard thinking and an attentive, always tender openness to the world, especially the natural world."

Seamus Heaney may have died, but he also celebrated the natural world and the cycles of life, as in this poem below-appropriate in late August:

Blackberry-Picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked and picked until the cans were full

Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair

That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.