Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet whose verse captured the transcendent power, darkness and humanity of his conflicted homeland, died Friday at a hospital in Dublin. He was 74.

In accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, Heaney acknowledged another Irish Nobel laureate, William Butler Yeats, and the power of Yeats' verse to define an Ireland beyond the violence of its independence almost a century ago. Heaney came to give voice to another period of violent upheaval that defined his native province of Ulster for much of his 50-year writing career.

The poet Robert Lowell called Heaney the greatest Irish poet since Yeats. The poet Paul Muldoon, a student of Heaney's in the 1960s, said his mentor was "actually the most popular Irish poet ever," although Heaney would have been indifferent to such ranking.