Long seen as one of his country’s most accomplished writers, Irish poet Seamus Heaney died Friday at the age of 74. The American poet Robert Lowell said Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize, was the “most important Irish poet since Yeats.” Heaney died in a Dublin hospital following a short illness, his family said. The oldest of nine children, Heaney was raised on a farm and became a teacher before publishing his first poetry collection, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966. His final work Human Chain was published in 2010 following a stoke. Its central poem, “Miracle,” was inspired by his illness. In 2011, Ireland’s president, Michael D. Higgins, called Heaney, a “man who truly understands the Irish people and their historical landscape”.