The Redress of Poetry

by Seamus Heaney

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374524883
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/30/1996
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	698,251
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.54(d)

About the Author

Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 in Northern Ireland. His award-winning books of poetry include The Haw Lantern, Seeing Things, and The Spirit Level. A resident of Dublin, he has taught at Oxford and Harvard.

Editorial Reviews

Nobel laureate Heaney is a pastoralist with a strong and critical sense of history. His rich and earthy poems are about the life of the land of northern Ireland as well as the evolution of the heavily mythologized Irish identity. Heaney's sonorous lyricism stems from his love of the cycles of country life, the mystery of the sea, the satisfying rhythm of hard, physical work. But Heaney loves poetry and poetics as well as nature and expresses this passion in his forceful if demanding literary essays. This is his third book of criticism, and it contains 10 lectures Heaney delivered as professor of poetry at Oxford. In the title essay, Heaney explains how poetry balances the 'scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium.' After considering all the burdens contemporary poets carry, from the long tradition of the form itself to pressing political perspectives, Heaney still insists that 'poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness.' This viewpoint underlies his shrewd essays on George Herbert, Christopher Marlowe, the Irish poet Brian Merriman, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, and Elizabeth Bishop.” —Booklist

From the Publisher

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. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In 1989 Heaney-who recently won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature-was elected professor of poetry at Oxford University; the lectures he gave there are collected in this book. By "redress" Heaney means the preferred definition of compensation for a wrong, but he also intends the obsolete meaning of bringing hunting dogs back to the chase, since poetry is a game of "fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness," one in which a force "unhindered, yet directed, can sweep ahead into its full potential." Eminently readable, the various essays here are united by a personal yet profound tone. They explore a broad range of poets, from Christopher Marlowe and John Clare to W.B. Yeats and Elizabeth Bishop, but Heaney's focus is on poetry's ability to redress "all of life's inadequacies, desolations, and atrocities," not by means of direct political response but simply by being its own intrinsic reward. For all literary collections. [For a selected list of works by Heaney currently in print, see p. 68.]-David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee

Library Journal