The redress of poetry

Resource Information

The work The redress of poetry represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The redress of poetry

Statement of responsibility

Seamus Heaney

Creator

• Heaney, Seamus, 1939-2013

Subject

• American poetry -- History and criticism
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• English poetry -- History and criticism
• English poetry -- Irish authors | History and criticism

Genre

• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

• These lectures were delivered by Seamus Heaney while he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. In the first of them, Heaney discusses and celebrates poetry's special ability to redress spiritual balance and to function as a counterweight to hostile and oppressive forces in the world. He proceeds to explore how this 'redress' manifests itself in a diverse range of poems and poets, including Christopher Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander', 'The Midnight Court' by the eighteenth-century Irish poet Brian Merriman, John Clare's vernacular writing and Oscar Wilde's 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'. Several twentieth-century poets are also discussed - W. B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop and others - and the whole book constitutes a vivid proof of the claim that 'poetry is strong enough to help'
• 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

Cataloging source

DLC

Index

no index present

LC call number

PR503

LC item number

.H38 1995

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography