Product Description

Delivered while Heaney was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, these lectures cover subjects as diverse as Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol" and Marlowe's "Hero and Leander", as well as work by Yeats, Larkin and Dylan Thomas.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #208590 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

Inspiring blend of personal response and academic criticism.
Highly recommended for anyone to whom poetry is important and feels that most criticism seems to miss the point.

These lectures were originally conceived and delivered as individual pieces, but as a collection they also provide an account and defence of Heaney's philosophy of poetry. Heaney deals with poems from the point of view of a reader to whom poetry is important as a means of understanding and coping with life -- for whom, as he says, poetry is "strong enough to help".

As literary criticism they are excellent (if eclectic), and are particularly valuable because they are free of much of the nonsense which creeps into academic commentary on poetry. This isn't to say that Heaney always makes perfect sense, and a couple of the pieces veer towards self-indulgence; nevertheless they are extremely readable, stimulating and -- an extremely rare thing in critical writing -- inspiring.