The Redress of Poetry. Oxford Lectures.

First edition. 8vo. Pp. xviii, 213. Notes. Charcoal grey cloth boards, titled in cream white to spine.

Ten lectures delivered by Heaney between 1989 (with the inaugural address taking place on the 24th of October) and 1994, while he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. They explore a range of poems and poets including Christopher Marlowe, Brian Merriman, Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats, and Elizabeth Bishop in a celebration of poetry's singular ability to redress spiritual balance and to act as a counterweight to hostile and oppressive earthly forces.

Winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. "Heaney's lectures offer the reader a brimming metaphoric energy, a fine-tuned analytic vocabulary, a buoyant vivacity of description, a reflective humour, an ethical awareness, a capaciousness of mind, and an imaginative penetration that are unequalled in contemporary critical prose." –Helen Vendler, The New Yorker

[Brandes & Durkan A61a]