Defending Poetry

Plato taught that poetry was a moral corruption. Modern popular culture tends to treat poetry as at best irrelevant. Operating in the narrows between the double charge of immorality and insignificance, poets have continued to produce literary verse and to argue in prose for poetry's place in the social, civic, and ethical life. Through close readings of their prose works and their poetry, Defending Poetry examines the literary ethics of three of the twentieth century's most important poet-critics: Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill, while assessing the influence in this regard of a fourth, T. S. Eliot. In doing so, the book makes a timely intervention in current debates about literature and 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.