Oxford got remarkable value out of its Professor of Poetry and Nobel winner to be, while he had tenure there between 1989 and 1994. Heaney gave 15 lectures in all, of which ten are given in this volume (I bitterly regret that the one on Louis MacNeice appears in another book, Frontiers of Writing, rather than here). The first, which gives the book its title, ranges over a wide spectrum of ideas and authors; the second is about Marlowe's (unfinished) narrative poem Hero and Leander, the third on Merriman's The Midnight Court, which cannot have been at all familiar to a (presumably) largely English audience. John Clare, a favourite of Heaney's, and Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol come next on his poetic/critical agenda. After that, he moves into the 20th century with lecture essays on Hugh MacDiarmid, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, and a discussion on "last things" in Yeats and Philip Larkin. The last two might seem an unlikely coupling, but in fact Heaney uses them as poetic opposites in their attitudes to death and mortality/immortality, and a brilliant discourse he makes of it. With Dylan Thomas, a poet of whom English critics have rarely taken the precise measure, he is sympathetic but selective in his praise, and on MacDiarmid, another awkward figure to do justice to or even to see clearly, Heaney with much acuity winnows the core of fine work from the considerable areas of rant and verbosity. This is a poet's criticism, with a poet's ear for technique and sense of imagery, but it is not written for the specialist, and verse apart, Heaney is now in his prime as a master of firm, easy sounding but resonant prose.