MICHAEL O'NEILL, The All Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900.

Abstract

MICHAEL O’NEILL's new book contributes to an imposing, proliferating field of studies in influence and allusion. Among his precursors in examining the legacies of Romanticism in modern and post-modern poetry are Frank Kermode (The Romantic Image, 1957), Northrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, 1957), and, more recently, Fiona Stafford (Starting Lines in Scottish, Irish and English Poetry: From Burns to Heaney, 2004). But inevitably, the greatest shadow is cast by Harold Bloom, whose work on Shelley and Yeats informs an early chapter, and whose anxiety theory is a precursor provides O’Neill his own model of guidance and resistance. For a slim book, this is a study of remarkable latitude, and the ambitious range provides The All Sustaining Air its major distinction; O’Neill draws together a diverse spectrum of subjects from Yeats, including Eliot, Stevens, Spender, Heaney, Hill, and Fisher, taking the notion of ‘post-Romantic’ into the twenty-first century. In conceiving of influence, O’Neill finds his path of individuation, like those he locates in his subjects. Rather than the bleak, ‘quasi-Freudian’ tussle between egos of Bloom's 1973 work, the present author offers a more optimistic account of various, nourishing dialogues between his twentieth-century subjects and their romantic predecessors, the performance of ‘an interplay between indebtedness and individuation’.