SOURCE: Pratt, William. Review of The Redress of Poetry, by Seamus Heaney. World Literature Today 70, no. 3 (summer 1996): 698.

In the following review, Pratt criticizes Heaney's overemphasis on politics in The Redress of Poetry.

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...