THE REDRESS OF POETRY

The Redress of Poetry is a collection of lectures delivered by Seamus Heaney while he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, from 1989 to 1994. In the first of them, Heaney discusses and celebrates poetry’s special ability to function as a counterweight to hostile forces in the world. He goes on to explore how this ‘redress’ manifests itself in a diverse range of poems, from Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’ to Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. Twentieth-century poets such as Dylan Thomas and Elizabeth Bishop are also discussed, and the whole book constitutes a vivid proof of Heaney’s claim that ‘poetry is strong enough to help’.