DUBLIN, Aug 31: Seamus Heaney, one of the world’s best-known poets and winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for literature, died yesterday after a short illness at the age of 74, his family said. The Northern Ireland-born Heaney’s poems evoke an Irish country childhood, with images of potato diggers and peat bog cutters, and echo the deep political splits that have divided the island. (agencies)