The Redress of Poetry [Paperback]

Seamus Heaney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 30, 1996

Seamus Heaney defines the title of this work of criticism as follows: "To redress poetry is to know and celebrate it for its forcibleness as itself . . . not only as a matter of profferd argument and edifying content but as a matter of angelic potential, a motion of the soul." Throughout this collection, Heaney's insight and eloquence are themselves of a poetic order.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

From the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature comes a collection of essays based on lectures he delivered while Professor of Poetry at Oxford. The great Irish poet delivers wisdom about his craft in a style full of humor and devoid of pedantry. With his expansive spirit, Heaney examines poets such as Brian Merriman, Oscar Wilde, Dylan Thomas and, of course, William Butler Yeats. The Redress of Poetry is a rare opportunity to enter the lecture hall and learn from a master. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

The 10 essays on poetry collected here, adapted from lectures delivered at Oxford between 1989 and 1994, display much of the intellectual restlessness, linguistic wizardry and political conscience that have shaped Heaney's own poetry. His thesis is that poetry of the highest order must redress social imbalances, at once transfiguring the circumstances it observes and offering an unforeseen, more humane, aesthetic alternative. This is an abstract and rigorous idea, yet nonacademic readers will find much to savor as Heaney tests and refines his paradigm in light of a largely canonical selection of poets (most are from the British Isles). Ranging freely from a brief life of each poet to a close reading of a few poems by him or her, he addresses, for instance, how Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" assuages the "loss" to which it alludes; how Christopher Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" "extended the alphabet" of Elizabethan sexual mores; and how 19th-century rustic poet John Clare achieved a truly lyrical local idiom at odds with official English. With their palpable evocation of the writing process and their disavowal of jargon and trendy political abstractions, these are exemplary essays?and tell us much about the influences and obsessions of this year's Nobel laureate in literature.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 30, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374524882
• ISBN-13: 978-0374524883
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #515,440 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Strong Enough To Help, February 23, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Redress of Poetry (Paperback)

The Redress of Poetry is a series of lectures given by Seamus Heaney at Oxford; in all of them, he examines poetry and how it can be strong enough to help the reader, to act as an equal force to the life lived by the reader. He looks at all kinds of poets - Dylan Thomas, Christopher Marlowe, Yeats, Wilde and Bishop - and of course talks about his own position as a Catholic from the Northern Ireland living in Dublin. In all the lectures Heaney is wonderfully informal and funny, while still solidly getting across how important and vital these writers are. The lecture on Thomas alone is a great lesson on writing and authenticity, and the last one, "Frontiers of Writing", makes a strong case that a nation is imagined by writers first - that language, poetry, opens up possibilities in nations as well as in people. Though he knows that words can't do everything, Heaney's affection for writing and writers is convincing. At his best, he made me want to go back to the poet and read more, and not many people can make me do that!