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’.
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