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Introduction and Short Summary to the

Redress of Poetry
Ever since Plato, poets have been a victim of the allegation that poetry is a
useless thing and that it does not have anything to offer. And poets have always been
trying to defend themselves. It is probably Heaney who has defended
poetry the best. He starts with the argument that a Heckler might question
about the use of poetry but might not have a thorough reading of poetry. He would
have his allegations based merely upon the little reading he might have had in his
lifetime. He might say that politics, science and other fields of knowledge have
contributed towards the development of mankind but poetry has not served
mankind at all, as poetry is something associated only with
imagination and poets are the imaginative people who do not have
anything concrete to offer.
To answer these charges, Heaney proposes a number of advantages of
poetry.
1. Poetry has a redressing effect. It renders hope to its readers by saying it
is a state of mind not the state of the world.
2. A poet sees the society and finds out the reasons of disturbance in
the equilibrium in a society. He is the one who not only recognizes the
source of disturbance but also adds weight to the lighter scale to restore the
equilibrium.
3. Poetry gives an outlet to the powerful emotions of the poet as well as the
reader and hence protects them from violence without.
Heaney also answers the question why we do not enjoy poetry. He says that we
enjoy poetry only when our experience coincides with the experience of the poet. As
the taste of apple does not lie in the fruit itself but in its contact with the palate.
The first poem quoted in full in this book is George Herberts The Pulley;
the last is one of Heaney himself, a twelve-line section from a sequence called
Squarings. The Squarings poem tells the story of an apparition experienced by the
monastic community in Clonmacnoisie sometime during the Middle Ages: a crewman came down to them out of a visionary boat in the sky but could not stay and
had to be helped back out of the human element because, as the abbot
perceived, he would have drowned in it if he had remained. The Pulley is a
parable about God devising a way to keep the minds and aspirations of human
beings turned towards the heavenly in spite of all the pleasures and penalties of
being upon earth. Both poems are about the way consciousness can be alive to two
different and contradictory dimensions of reality and still find a way of negotiating
between them, but I did not notice this correspondence between their thematic
and imaginative concerns until the whole book had been assembled in
manuscript.