Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Seamus Heaney is a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, The Associated Press reported yesterday.

Heaney, a famed Irish poet whose work has been canonized in the Norton Anthologies of English Literature, Poetry and Modern Poetry, teaches poetry writing seminars to undergraduates each spring.

The 1994 Nobel prizes will be announced beginning next week in Stockholm. The literature prize, worth about $930,000, will be announced on a Thursday in October--after only a few days' notice to the winner and the world, wrote The Associated Press.

The permanent agreement Heaney reached with Harvard in 1984 exempts him from teaching fall semesters.

The poet, who holds numerous honorary degrees from prestigious universities across the country, is spending this semester at his home in Dublin and is currently traveling in Australia, an English Department spokesperson said yesterday.

Harvard affiliates were uniform in their support for Heaney as a Nobel contender.

"Heaney has stuck with his craft and never given in to cheap and easy politics," said Lindsay Waters, an executive editor at the Harvard University Press. "He is a supporter of his fellow poets, a generous promoter of other people, and a good human being."

Noel C. Allen '95-'96 took two of Heaney's poetry courses and audited another. She said there have been rumors of Heaney's Nobel contention for several years.

"He has incredible integrity as an artist," Allen said. "His were the best classes I have taken at Harvard."

Heaney was born on a farm in Northern Ireland in 1939. He graduated with first class honors from Queen's University in Belfast.

Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English and American Literature and Language Henri Cole said Heaney is the obvious choice for the prize--considering the competition.

"His constituency is all of Ireland, all the world," Cole said. "He is the perfect voice for the way Irish politics seem to be headed at last."

Waters agreed that Heaney has long been a notable observer of Ireland's political strife.

"Heaney has been cursed for 'keeping his distance,'" Waters said. "But this distance has given him the perspective to see what is going on; he has become the witness to the suffering of his people."

American novelist Tom Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

Jan Eklund, a prominent European literature critic for Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, told The Associated Press, "It should be time for a European author [to win]."