These lectures were delivered by Seamus Heaney while serving as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. In the first of these, Heaney discusses and celebrates the unique ability of poetry to restore spiritual balance and serve as a counterweight against hostile and oppressive forces in the world. He goes on to explore how this 'restoration' is manifested in a diverse range of poems and poets, including Christopher Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander', 'The Midnight Court' by the eighteenth-century Irish poet Brian Merriman, the folk writing of John Clare, and Oscar Wilde's 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'. Several twentieth-century poets - W. B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, and others - are also discussed, and the entirety of the book stands as a vibrant testament to the claim that 'poetry is capable of aiding'.