Redress of Poetry: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford Oct 24 1989

Professor Seamus Heaney delivered his inaugural lecture on 24th October, 1989. The poet whom Professor Heaney chose to celebrate in his inaugural lecture was George Herbert. He described him as not just the epitome of English poetic virtue but the embodiment of certain qualities of phlegm, tolerance and equanimity which are usually ascribed to the English themselves. Professor Heaney argues that poetry's present use is neither political nor futile. It offers instead a redress to our discontents and failures, not by lending rhetorical aid to particular causes, but by a symbolic resolution of insoluble problems.