Defending Poetry: Art and Ethics in Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill(Oxford English Monographs)

Defending Poetry studies the tradition of poetic defence, or apologia, as it has been pursued and developed by three of the twentieth century's leading poet-critics: Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. It begins with an extended introduction to philosophical debates over the ethical value of literature from Plato to Levinas and continues by situating these three poets as in one sense historically continuous with the defences of Horace, Sidney, Coleridge, and Shelley, but also as drastically other. This otherness is bounded on one side by the example of T. S. Eliot's career-long contemplation of the ideal of poetic 'integrity', and on the other by a collective recognition of the twentieth century's great horrors, which seem to corrode all associations of art and the good. Through close readings of the poems and prose essays of Brodsky, Heaney, and Hill, Defending Poetry makes a timely intervention in current debates about literature's ethics, arguing that any ethics of literature ought to take into account not only poetry, but also the writings of poets on the value of poetry.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations 1: Ethics, Literature, and the Place of Poetry 2: Joseph Brodsky: A 'Peremptory Trust in Words' 3: Seamus Heaney: Beyond the 'Dialect of the Tribe' 4: Geoffrey Hill: A 'Question of Value' Bibliography Index

About the Author :
David-Antoine Williams was educated at Harvard University, The University of St Andrews, and Balliol College, Oxford, where he completed his doctoral work. He is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and a Junior Research Fellow in English at Hertford College, Oxford.

Review :
Williams' prose style is graceful and exact ... Defending Poetry is especially appealing in its implicit protest to academic trends which ask us to read poetry in search of its (dis)contents, political or otherwise. Woven into Williams' good book is an appreciation for the intellectual and spiritual experience of reading -the dance of the intellect, the music of the language, the very look of words on the page, and above all the radical challenge to prevailing powers that caused Plato to banish poets from his ideal republic in the first place. informative and rewarding. a very interesting argument indeed, and in his opening sections Williams defends it with vigour, sensitivity and an astonishing range of reference.