CREDITING POETRY

Crediting Poetry is the text of Seamus Heaney’s Nobel lecture, delivered in Stockholm in December 1995. Opening with a memorable description of the ‘creaturely existence’ of his childhood, and his first exposure to outside voices on the radio, Heaney traces his path into ‘the wideness of language’. He delivers his defence of poetry as ‘the ship and anchor’ of our spirit, with power to address both the marvellous and the murderous in society. It remains perhaps Heaney’s most eloquent and authoritative affirmation of the art of poetry.