Seamus Heaney describes himself as a person who “emerged from a hidden and buried life and entered the realm of education” (“Seamus Heaney”). This quote showed him transforming from a poor child living in a depressed farming town in Northern Ireland to transforming into a Nobel Peace Prize poet and professor. He was a postmodern and contemporary poet who transformed the Catholic and Protestant conflict into a literary debate. Without influential and unorthodox poets like Heaney, the revolution would have ended extremely differently. Seamus Heaney has been a poet throughout much of modern history, from Neil Armstrong walking on the moon to the present day. Seamus Heaney was a product of the postmodern and contemporary era, a time of rebellion in Northern Ireland, because his writing illustrated the literary characteristics of idealism and self-expression. By the time Seamus Heaney began writing poetry, the feud between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants was heating up and had become a civil war by 1971 (“Seamus Heaney-Biographic”). Civilian deaths were not uncommon during riots, and military barricades were built. It was a time of intense warfare in Northern Ireland. The English army tried to calm the citizens, but this only made the problems worse. The riots were bloody and often resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people ("Seamus Heaney, Irish Poet"). The most famous day of the rebellion was considered “Bloody Sunday” (“Seamus Heaney: “Casualty” ”). It was then that the British army attacked twenty-six unarmed citizens ("Seamus Heaney: "Casualty""). These massacres of citizens tripled the size of the conflict. This period was also a time of segregation in the United States (“Significant Historical Events in the United States from 1950 to 2013”). The ideas of The Civil Rights... middle of paper... were very profound, thoughtful and above all free. In the lines “All free as the wind” and “Their imaginations ruled their whims,” the freedom and imagination that is exploding in these children is evident. These children were the children of joy and love. At the end of the poem, the last five lines move on to when the children are older and how they have changed, but hopefully their idealism and innocence are the same. This era shows us that we know that all those people with high ideas and self-expression have changed the way we live today, from integration to simply unleashed creativity. The postmodern and contemporary era has been full of change and development, and without special poets, like Seamus Heaney, we would not have been able to read the era in which the poets lived, learning the history so deeply..