The lectures Seamus Heaney gave while occupying the Chair of Poetry at Oxford from 1989 to 1994 are magisterial, perhaps even to a fault, since he ranges all the way from Herbert and Marlowe to Merriman and MacDiarmid, from John Clare to Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, and Elizabeth Bishop. If his purpose is to show his wide reading in the English, Scottish, Welsh, and American poetic traditions, to “redress” the imbalance of his Irish poetic prejudices, then he has made his case. But he has something more in mind, for he states in his title essay [in The Redress of Poetry] that “as a mode of redress in the first sense,” poetry can be “an agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices.” His main effort therefore is not so much literary as social, and his reading of poets quite different from himself is directed more to establishing their relevance to current causes than to understanding what they might have meant in their own historical or national context. In short, in this third collection of his prose Heaney shows himself to be a surprisingly fashionable academic critic, whose tenure as a professor at Harvard and Oxford may have had more influence on his critical opinions than his receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature (see WLT 70:2, pp. 253-66).

Of course, no one would deny that Heaney is always engaging, or that there is much pleasure to be found in his graceful way of quoting and praising a rich variety of poems; but when it comes to their substance, the essays are disappointing, for instead of treating poetry as intrinsically worthy of his attention because of its artistic merit, he examines it for ethnic or sexual themes: we have George Herbert's Anglicanism, the Scottish nationalism of Christopher Grieve (alias Hugh MacDiarmid), the Welsh bardic oratory of Dylan Thomas, the homoeroticism of Marlowe's “Hero and Leander” and Wilde's “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” the feminism of Brian Merriman's Midnight Court and Elizabeth Bishop's lyrics, and finally, in “The Frontiers of Writing,” a host of contemporary Irish poets who have tried to speak for a united Ireland despite its “troubles,” as he concedes Yeats once did admirably and as he himself has tried to do. He quotes his own poetry more than once, first as a translator of Ovid in his essay on Merriman, then as a Northern Irish Catholic poet in his final essay, affirming his “attempt to bring the frontiers of the country into alignment with the frontiers of writing, an attempt to sketch the shape of an integrated literary tradition.”

Thus, although Seamus Heaney can speak from a central position in contemporary poetry, and says he wants to “confirm the possibility of a new commonwealth of art,” he chooses to assert his own ethnic identity in these lectures delivered at Oxford, insisting that “there was still nothing deleterious to my sense of Irishness in the fact that I grew up in the minority in Northern Ireland and was educated within the dominant British culture.” And so what he means by “the redress of poetry” turns out to be more partisan, and more political, than one would expect from a poet of his high international standing. He is most winning when he quotes himself, because his poetry ultimately offers more “redress” than his prose.