How do poems communicate moral ideas? Can they express concepts in ways that are unique and impossible to replicate in other forms of writing? This book explores these questions by turning to two of the late twentieth century's most important poets: Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill. Their work shows that a poem can act as an example of a moral concept, rather than simply a description or discussion of it. Exploring these two poets via their shared preoccupation with poetry's moral exemplarity opens up new perspectives on their work. The concept of exemplarity is shown to play an important role in these poets' most significant preoccupations, from moral complicity to the nature of lyric speech to literary influence to memorialisation, responsibility, and aesthetic autonomy. Through this new analysis of poetry, critical prose, drama, and archival materials, this book offers a major new study of ethics in the later period of these two writers—including recent underexplored posthumous works. In turn, the book also makes an important intervention in larger debates about literature and morality, and about the field of ethical criticism itself: this is the first book-length study to expand ethical criticism beyond its customary narrative focus. The ethical criticism of fiction is often an exercise in methodological advocacy, urging the use of more literary examples in moral philosophy. As this book shows, including poetry among these examples introduces new, lyric-inflected caveats about the use of literature as a form of moral example: caveats which remain invisible in narrative-centred ethical criticism.

How do poems communicate moral ideas? Can they express concepts in ways that are unique and impossible to replicate in other forms of writing? This book explores these questions by turning to two of the late twentieth century's most important poets - Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill. Their work shows that a poem can act as an example of a moral concept, rather than simply a description or discussion of it.

The author explores the impact on poetic practice in the 1970s and 1980s of recent theoretical developments, offering a criticism of the work of Seamus Heaney and of poets including Michael Hofmann, reassessing life on Mars and providing retrospective surveys of Fleur Adcock and others.

A collection of essays about W. B. Yeats.

Ruth Padel is an award-winning poet who has also become renowned as an energetic, generous and thought-provoking guide to reading poetry. Her 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, with its lively overview of contemporary writing and eye-opening readings of individual poems, is indispensable for anyone who writes poetry, teaches it, or simply wants to enjoy it. In her new book, she uses sixty poems by some of our finest poets to look at the idea of the journey, through literature and through life.As Padel makes clear in her fascinating introduction, today's debates about how accessible a poem should be are poetry's older tradition. To rhyme or not to rhyme? The Elizabethans fought over that one, while the Greeks couldn't agree about whether poetry should be dumbed down or remain the preserve of the elite. Combining her training as a Classicist with her insights as a poet, Padel highlights the ways in which the best poets now find a balance between rhymed formal verse and modernism's freer styles, using a traditional, formal craft to convey genuinely felt, up-to-the-minute experience. In an increasingly unstable world, she argues, we need poetry more than ever to help us to see afresh and understand the journeys of our lives.