Seamus Justin Heaney (April 13, 1939 to August 30, 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. American poet Robert Lowell described Heaney as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats." Heaney delivered his Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech in Stockholm on December 7, 1995—a powerful defense of poetry as "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive politics and world-sorrow.