THE REDRESS OF POETRY: Oxford Lectures.

First edition, first printing. From the library of Professor James Booth, with his pencilled name and date to the front free endpaper and occasional light pencil annotations. Original charcoal cloth lettered in white to the spine, in the dustwrapper which reproduces a sixteenth century woodcut from Musaeus' 'Opusculum de Herone et Leandro' in the Beinecke Library. A fine copy, the binding square and tight, the contents except for the annotations mentioned above, clean throughout. Complete with the fine dustwrapper, the matte laminate finish (as usual) showing a few light surface marks. Not price-clipped (£15.99 net to the front flap).

'The Redress of Poetry' collects ten of the fifteen lectures delivered by Seamus Heaney during his tenure as Oxford Professor of Poetry (1989-94). The title, reflects the overarching theme of poetry as spiritual redress, as a counterweight to the oppressive forces exerted by the quotidian (it is a theme running through 'The Spirit Level', the collection of poems Heaney published the following year). The poets and poems examined span four centuries, from Christopher Marlowe and George Herbert through to Philip Larkin and Elizabeth Bishop, via Wilde, MacDiarmaid, Yeats, and Dylan Thomas. This copy belonged to James Booth, former Professor of English at the University of Hull, and a colleague, friend, scholar, and biographer of Philip Larkin. Booth clearly read Heaney's lectures with pencil in hand, and his occasional very neat and lightly written marginal notes provide a fascinating informal commentary on the lectures. Appreciative, critical, sometimes barbed (Heaney is variously accused of "word-spinning", "piousness" and the curiously Larkin-esque charge of "international name-dropping"), it is, unsurprisingly, the lecture devoted to Larkin and Yeats which elicits Booth's most penetrating marginalia. Though occasional and light enough to be easily erased, the notes are an intriguing record of an engaged, deeply informed reading of Heaney's lectures. "Confident that true poetry stretches a tripwire across the path of the ideologue, [for Heaney], never a polemicist, always the scrupulous, admiring reader", poetry can help "restore the mysterious otherness of the world." (J. D. McClatchy, 'The New York Times', December 24, 1995; Brandes and Durkan A61).

Stock code: 24266

£65

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Author:

HEANEY, Seamus

Published:

London: Faber and Faber.
1995

Category

Modern First Editions
Literature
Poetry
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