The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900 by Michael O'Neill

Abstract

9go Reviews consonants withno compensationispresumably evil (lowmorals)' (pp. 141-42). More gently, andperhapsthe most important Confucianlesson ofall,anearlyletter toFengchi Yangadvises'Sothings areproceedinginorder, first friendship, and then politics'(p.36). ZhaomingQian hasbroughtto theforeground notonlyan essentialsourcefor Pound'sorientalthinking buta necessary chapterincross-cultural endeavour. UNIVERSITY OF KEELE IAN F.A. BELL The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals inBritish, American, and IrishPoetrysince10oo. ByMICHAELO'NEILL. Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press. 2007.Viii+208pp. ?45. ISBN978-o-19-929928-7. The jacketillustration of MichaelO'Neill's inspiring book reveals howdangerously beautiful the oxymoronically 'all-sustaining air' is.PaulNash's 1941Battleof Britain painting,executedinwarm shadesof ochreand blue, juxtaposestheRomantic majestyof a sunset with the Modern horrors ofairborne warfare,theextravagant splendour ofnature with the narrowly focused destruction ofhumans. The swirling cloudsarecomposedoutoftheexhaust ofbattling planes;anapproaching formation intheevening sky consists, notof migrating birds, butof warplanes;thefiery sunset istroubled by theblacksmoke ofdeadlyexplosions;theaircanno longer sustaina hitplanewhichplummets toitsend inaway similar toBrueghel'sIcarusin Auden's 'Musee des Beaux Arts'. It is a scene of both barbarism and heroism, sublime beauty and infernal horror. ViewingNash's painting, one comes to theconclusionthat an interpretation is less amatter of juxtaposition, with its emphasis on comparing and contrasting, on exclusive preference forone visionoveranother.It ismore a matterofpairingand couplingpossibilities with a view toenhancedappreciation andunderstanding. This isthestrategy whichO'Neill so successfully deploysinhis Romantically inspired readings ofawide range ofpoets (including Auden,Bishop, Eliot,Fisher, Heaney, Hill,Kavanagh, Mahon,Muldoon, Spender, Stevens, Yeats). InRomanticism and theSelf-Conscious Poem (Oxford: ClarendonPress,1997) O'Neill argued that 'many poems by themajor Romantic poets are energized and subtilized by their consciousness of themselves as poems' (p.xv).Thisbook goes one stepfurther byexploring'waysinwhichRomanticpoetryboth renewsitself and iscreatively used, contested, and reworked in a rangeof twentieth-century, and some twenty-first-century poetry'(p.9). The abovesentence suggests thatthe ideaof influence isnotnecessarily ironic ordebilitating. AsO'Neill illustrates with Elizabeth Bishop: 'herirony is more thanreductive wariness;itinvolves sustaining a doubleresponsiveness, offering notjusta belatedknowingness, butalso an authen ticknowing of the Romanticsthemselves' (p. io).O'Neill himself employs'double responsiveness' byreading poetry'asliterary criticism', byallowingthe poem tobe the 'placewhere the finestand most nuanced reading of a previous poem or poetry occurs' (p. 1i). As a resultwe read about post-1goo poems having conversations with Romantic poems, invoking yet other poems, both Romantic and post-1goo, MLR, 104.1, 2009 191 to make their point.Inaddition O'Neill often bringsinto playthepoets'ownpoe tics,articulated in foraranging from criticalessaysto interviews, toenhancehis readings. What isground-breaking, evenslightly maverick, aboutthisapproachis theskill withwhich reductive readings areavoided.By reductive readingsImean thoseentrenched inan inimicalrelation to their subject-matter, makingassertive butbluntclaims, basedon often paranoidbinarythinking. One couldnot wish for amoreattuned, erudite guidetothese poemsthan O'Neill. His extensive bibliographical, editorial, and textual scholarship informs hisdistrust of limiting definitions ofRomanticism(s) while at thesame timeithasmade him onlytooaware ofthe necessity for reading beyondandaroundthestridently obvious. Themuch-quotedlinebyYeatsaboutKeatswithhis 'nosepressedtoa sweet-shop window',forinstance, isrecharged withnewenergy whenO'Neill drawsattention to thefactthat'thetoneofbrutal, overriding assertion concedesthat assertionis groundedinsubjective impression ("I see a schoolboy when I think ofhim",55) (p.41).Thisbookwillbe enjoyed byallreaders who considertheir engagement with poems in 'the actoffindingI Whatwill suffice' as anongoing one. VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OFWELLINGTON HEIDI THOMSON Twentieth-Century FictionbyIrish Women: NationandGender.ByHEATHERING MAN.Aldershot:Ashgate. 2007. 206pp. ?35.99. ISBN978-0-7546-3538-3. HeatherIngman uses the writings ofJulia Kristevatostudythe'destabilizing force' (p. 3) of twentieth-century fiction by Irish women-around thirty works,each meritingabout four pagesof comment. Followinga historicalintroduction, each chapter considersa particular aspectofKristevantheory: theother,thesemiotic, themother, the foreigner, and the sacred, with a final chapter applying all these to fiction from the North.ThisKristevanframework does indeedseemparticularly apt foran Irishcontext. Her 'punning redefinition ofheretics as "herethics"'(p. 115), for example, regains what was lost in translation when said with an Irish accent. However,thisframework also risks producing circular readings oftexts that seemto havebeenchosen(andmaywellhavebeenwritten) withKristevantheory in mind. 'Reading women'swritingthrough aKristevanlens [ametaphorofwhich Ing man is fond(see also p. 181)]may provideforalternative femaleidentities and suggest a way out of the stereotypes of Northern Irish women as either passive victims ofviolenceorbomb-throwing viragoes'(p. 154)-though a farlessadept guide mighthavesuccessfully steered a pathbetweenthose particular alternatives. Ingman'sstudy'hopestokeep faith withKristeva'semphasison theparticularity of theindividual woman' (p.4); however, theverynextpage confuses-forgivably, perhaps-Anna andAnne-MarieSmithand their respective books (Julia Kristeva...