“Whate’er These Words Cannot Express”: In Memory of Michael O’Neill

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Previous articleNext article Free“Whate’er These Words Cannot Express”: In Memory of Michael O’Neill Michael O’Neill, Shelleyan Reimaginings and Influence: New Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 352 pp. US$85.00.Mark SandyMark SandyDurham University, United Kingdom Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMorePublished posthumously in April 2019, the sheer range, elegance, and command of Shelleyan Reimaginings and Influence testify to Michael O’Neill’s eminence as a scholar of Romanticism, as well as to his acute sensitivity to the subtleties of poetic meter, form, and meaning. Until his death on December 21, 2018, Michael O’Neill was Professor of English at Durham University, where he taught for nearly forty years. During that time he served for two terms as Head of Department and as Acting Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham.Over his life-long career at Durham, Michael’s prolific publications as a scholar and editor of Romanticism established him as a world-leading authority in the field. He published widely in numerous books, articles, and chapters on Romantic poetry, especially the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and on a vast range of eighteenth-, Victorian, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century poets. Although Michael will be remembered first and foremost for his scholarship on the poetry of Shelley (including Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life [Macmillan, 1989]), his knowledge of, and commitment to, poetry was extraordinary, ranging from Dante to the contemporary. Fittingly, the dust jacket of Michael’s majestic study of Shelley and “new relations” reproduces John Flaxman’s The Meeting with Statius that, depicting the convergence of three poets, Virgil, Statius, and Dante from the Purgatorio, speaks to Michael’s concern throughout his distinguished career with questions of poetic self-consciousness, literary achievement, dialogue, and influence. Poetic form (rhyme, meter, verse, allusion) was, for Michael, the means by which poetry was self-consciously, even self-reflexively, engaged in conversations about its past origins, present moment, and possible future reception.Accordingly, Michael’s Shelleyan Reimaginings and Influence is divided broadly into three discrete but interrelated sections. The first of these focuses on the foundational aspects of Shelley’s poetic thought and poetry formed out of the “triple pillars of his cultural inheritance” (22): the classical world (particularly Plato), the Renaissance (represented by John Milton and Edmund Spenser), and Christianity (the Bible and the notion of deity). Shelley’s engagement as a poet, essayist, and translator with Plato is foundational and, according to Michael, “influenced not only [Shelley’s] thinking but also his prose style, and not only his poetic style, but his development of an original poetic prose” (28). Michael champions Shelley as an innovator of a poetic prose that shares with Plato “a reluctance simply to jettison the sensuous in favour of the idea” (31) and “delights in Plato’s idealizing,” but Shelley remains constantly “aware of what is at stake in the act of idealizing” (44). If Shelley’s immersion in Plato produces a reinvention of the prose form, then Spenser and Milton, to varying degrees, play a crucial part in assisting Shelley in “fashioning a sophisticated vision of art and experience” (45) through a re-visioning of the genres of romance, lyric, and epic. Shelley naturally swerves away, as Michael observes, from “Spenser’s Christian Platonism” but, at every turn, in The Witch of Atlas and Adonais, Shelley “persuades the reader that he has absorbed Spenser deeply into his imagination’s bloodstream” (53). With Milton in his sights in Prometheus Unbound, Shelley urges both “its readers to engage with subversive Miltonic energies” and “to adapt those energies to the humanist ideals of love, freedom, and justice advocated in the lyrical drama” (61). From Shelley’s harnessing of “Miltonic energies,” the final chapter in this section turns to Shelley’s complex views of religion and its relation to poetry. Michael resists oversimplifying the situation and does not “see Shelley as a child of Enlightenment thought, scoffing at the superstitious follies of religion” (67). To describe more accurately “Shelley’s fluidity of attitude” toward questions of faith and religion, Michael neatly proposes a new category of “believing unbelief, or unbelieving belief” (69). Michael precisely illustrates how Shelley’s poetic expressions of disbelief about religious matters, rather than giving into disillusionment, enact a “‘re-enchantment’ of the world” (70).With their focus on imaginative interactions (negative and positive) with William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and John Keats, chapters 4–12 form the second segment of Michael’s remarkable book and illuminate “new relations” between Shelley and his contemporaries. Shelley shares some imaginative sympathy with the largely antipathetic Lamb but, ultimately, finds him “a poet who is too much preoccupied with theories and nostrums” (80). Hazlitt, too, may have objected to the egotism and “self-centredness” (91) of Shelley’s poetry, along with the writings of Wordsworth, Byron, and Southey, but, as Michael deftly shows, Shelley exceeded the poetic and political vision of Hazlitt as critic and revolutionary. The virtue of the intersecting legacies of Shelley and Hazlitt rests with the way that they “transform the terms of contestatory debate in light of an imaginative drive for betterment” (92). Michael recalibrates the importance of the unseen in “Wordsworth’s poetry [which] haunts Shelley’s figurations and imaginings” (97) from “The Two Spirits: An Allegory” to the final, incomplete The Triumph of Life. If Shelley’s verse could not exorcise Wordsworth’s concern with the hidden and seemingly unimportant, it equally exhibits a “responsiveness to Coleridge’s fascination with wholeness and coherence” that, diverging from Coleridge, emphasizes “the gap between poetic utterance and non-linguistic reality” (115). In the writing of an early poem, Queen Mab, Shelley emerges as an “ironic revisionist” of Southey and then as a mature poet discovers, Michael elegantly argues, in Southey a poetic pathway to offering “comparable combinations through ‘fictions’ that allowed for pursuit and redefinition” (144). Through their fascination with the fluidity and fixity of selfhood and their poetic treatment of identity, Byron and Shelley find affinity in “an endless force of inspiration [that] materializes itself, over and over, in an enabling cage of words” (157). As with Dante, Byron and Shelley place “the poetic self at the center of a poem, not to indulge ego, but to record experience, especially experience that can be called visionary” (193). Further striking touchstones emerge between Shelley’s poetic vision and Turner’s painterly depiction of Venice as both “creators [are] fascinated by process” as they experience “a pull towards potentiality even as they keep their eye on present glories and imperfections” (217).Before turning to a coda on the legacies of A. C. Bradley’s twentieth-century views of Shelley, the third section focuses on questions of reception in the writings of nineteenth-century writers. Through the works of Thomas Beddoes, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, Alfred Tennyson, and Algernon Swinburne, Michael traces the subtle continuities and discontinuities of Shelleyan modes of thought and poetic form in these later writers. Beddoes feels the allure of “Shelleyan indeterminacy” (230) and is fascinated with the “Shelleyan quest” to which he gives “his own self-divided inflections” (231). Those ghosts and their half-lives that dwell in Beddoes’s poetry Michael reads as refracted through the figure of “some lone ghost” summoned up by the narrator of Shelley’s Alastor “to render up the tale / Of what we are” (Alastor, lines 28–29). Subtly alert to the quest motif and gendering of the self in Shelley’s Alastor, Julian and Maddalo, and Prometheus Unbound, Hemans, for Michael, “is often artfully dialectical in her dealings with Shelley” (244) and sometimes, through her use of anonymized epigraph, “clandestine” in her manner of “cueing influences” (246) of Shelleyan origin. For her part, Landon’s presentation of selfhood, choice of image, rhyme, and tone is invariably distinctly and openly Shelleyan. Self-consciously and deliberately, Michael claims, Landon seeks to align herself “with a Romantic company of poets, all of whom win artistic recompense from experiential loss” (267). Tennyson, too, possesses, as Michael beautifully draws out, a “kindred readiness to subject orthodoxy to questioning, albeit of different kinds” and an “uncanny ear for Shelley’s darker tonalities” (281) that voice existential uncertainties about poetry, meaning, and life. Despite his self-confessed decadence, Swinburne’s meta-poetic mode of “self-witnessing recognition of its capacity to be” (297) is only made possible by his quietly distinctive adaptation and absorption of Shelley’s poetic techniques and thought.Thirty years before the publication of Shelleyan Reimaginings and Influence, Michael’s first monograph, The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry (Clarendon, 1989), examined in Shelley’s writing the intricate relationship between poetic thought and form. For Michael, Shelley’s poetry resists easily resolved certainties and derives from the conflict at its center its imaginative power and shape. Shelley as a poet is consciously alert to, as Michael’s perceptive readings demonstrate, the limitations of his chosen medium of language and constantly (deliberately) disclosing the fictive nature of its assumed forms. His subsequent book-length study, Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Clarendon, 1997), reevaluated familiar and less familiar writings by William Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats through a critical sensitivity to the varying modes of shifting self-awareness and their importance to Romanticism’s reassessment and elevation of the status of poetry itself. The ambit of Michael’s study of poetic self-consciousness extended to how the post-Romantic inheritance of creative self-awareness played itself out in the poetry of W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, and Amy Clampitt. Vital to Michael’s nuanced analysis of the delicate operations of poetic self-consciousness are significant questions of aesthetic value, literary production, as well as those of imaginative exchange and influence.Michael’s preoccupation with dialogue and legacy, especially with the Romantic bequest and inheritance, resulted in his breathtaking study The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900 (Oxford, 2007), which wears the breadth and depth of its knowledge lightly and without ever sacrificing attention to the details of its readings and their wider ramifications. Michael’s study throughout exhibits masterly, measured, and original readings of a dazzling, diverse array of poets, ranging from W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, through Auden, Stephen Spender, and Stevens, to Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Geoffrey Hill, and many others. Michael’s subtle critical sensitivity to how post-Romantic poets imaginatively reconfigured, resisted, or else sought to disavow their Romantic inheritance opened up a new and capacious approach to reckon with questions of literary authority and influence that did not simply invoke Bloomian ratios. Romantic influence emerges, then, as a complex, multidirectional, imaginative traversing of Romanticism and post-Romantic poetic thought and form; an ever shifting and multiplying series of transformative (whether accepting or reactionary) encounters with Romanticism’s inheritance.Without recourse to constraining theoretical models, Michael possessed an unnerving ability to articulate the means by which poetry has the power to know itself in ways that astute readers often felt but rarely could express. Michael’s incisiveness as a literary critic was inseparable from his careful attentiveness as a textual editor. His editorial work on Shelley included collaborating with Donald H. Reiman on a volume (1997) in Garland’s The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics fair-copy series, an edition of Shelley: The Major Works for Oxford University Press (2003, with Zachary Leader), and more recently, as associate editor on the multivolume Johns Hopkins University Press edition of Shelley’s poetry, the third volume of which (published in 2012) received the 2013 Richard J. Finneran Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship.Michael’s editorial skills extended to being an encouraging, generous, and sympathetic editor of others. Like so many of Michael’s achievements, there is not space enough here to list all of the many editorial projects that he so skillfully executed while always exhibiting great patience and kindness to his contributors. These include Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide (Clarendon, 1989), the landmark Cambridge History of English Poetry (2010), and John Keats in Context (Cambridge, 2017), as well as the coedited Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Blackwell, 2008, with Charles Mahoney) and The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013, with Anthony Howe). As director and founding member of the “Romantic Dialogues and Legacies” Research Group at Durham, Michael coedited, with Mark Sandy and Sarah Wootton, several critical collections, including Venice and the Cultural Imagination: “This Strange Dream upon the Water” (Pickering & Chatto, 2012) and The Persistence of Beauty: From the Victorians to the Moderns (Pickering & Chatto, 2015). Such collaborative enterprises were indicative of Michael’s unfailing intellectual generosity, which is equally reflected in his membership of many editorial boards (including Romanticism, Romantic Circles, and The Wordsworth Circle) and serving as chair of organizations such as the Wordsworth Foundation Trust and the International Byron Society.He received many awards for his criticism and poetry, including a Distinguished Scholar Award from the Keats-Shelley Association of America for 2018, an Eric Gregory Award in 1983, and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 1990. Michael published five collections of poetry, the two most recent collections of which are Return of the Gift (Arc, 2018) and Crash & Burn (Arc, 2019). His first poetry collection, The Stripped Bed (Harvill, 1990) was followed by the publication of Wheel (Arc, 2008) and Gangs of Shadow (Arc, 2014). Writing of the poems collected in Gangs of Shadow, Conor Carville, in London Magazine (April/May 2015: 38) remarked, “The lyric poem’s concern to construct voices and selves is evoked here in a manner that reminds one of O’Neill’s day job as an important scholar of Romanticism.” As the comment intimates, Michael’s passion for poetry as an art was there right from his early days as an academic at Durham University, where he cofounded and edited Poetry Durham from 1982 until 1994.Michael possessed a rare critical and creative mind that could think with, and through, literature. Michael’s commitment to poetry as a literary critic and poet recognized, as did Shelley, that the poetic mode is a way of knowing and understanding the world, even if its power resides in its fragile, momentary, incandescent, illumination: “A Power / Girt round with weakness” (Adonais, lines 281–82). This sense of the power of literature comes to the fore when, in a touchingly personal poem, “Those Days,” from The Return of the Gift, Michael declares “I couldn’t think without literature.” He is thinking here about how literature, poetry in particular, is helping him through his illness and is able, at least, as he puts it, to provide him with kinds and modes of response, a series of, as the post-Romantic poet Stevens averred, necessary fictions as a means of encountering existence and that which might otherwise be unbearable. With a hint of irony, Michael’s poem goes on to question the validity of these necessary illusions or fictions, but without ever dismissing them out of hand.Such hopeful ideal aspiration pitted against guarded skepticism recalls the skeptical-idealist dynamic that shapes many of Shelley’s poems and how they are so often attuned to the ways by which “Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates” (Prometheus Unbound, IV, lines 573–74). Michael’s literary criticism was so wonderful at articulating this Janus-like aspect of Shelley’s poetics, but Michael as a poet, too, was alert to this interplay between the positive energies of idealism and those skeptical, negative, darker forces. A wintry January poem, “Janus,” its title alluding to the Roman god of doorways and the month named after him, does precisely that by looking in two directions at once. Catching in its diction something of Hart Crane’s “wind flaking sapphire” (“Repose of Rivers”), Michael’s “Janus” realizes this double take by attributing both a steely coolness and a brittle fragility to a sliver of silver moon in a winter’s night sky:1Scimitar in the January sky—it starts again,the moon as resurgent emblem.“Renewal,” so its tacit lunar hummight be saying with mirthless irony,“beckons.” Well, why not wax as well as wane?2… Scimitar in the frost-clear skyseeming to cut its own shape stroke by strokeuntil it hangs there, aboveus, staring down likea painting by a cold-eyed master-monsterwho has foreseen morethan we can, without flinching, bearto contemplate the thought of.Michael’s poetic diptych enacts Shelley’s observation about poetry, from A Defence of Poetry, that it “spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things” (533). Poised between playful rumination of the given and serious contemplation of the unknown, Michael’s poem (as do all new years) offers the prospect of new beginnings, renewals, fresh starts, the possibilities of new relations and friendships. But it also stares bleakly at the ends of things, of the breaking-up of communities, of the loss of connections between people, of the final severing of individual lives and the speaker’s own. The moon’s “Scimitar” makes us feel as keenly the precarious frailness of human existence as it does our incomprehensibility when confronted by individual loss.Michael, “whose light adorned the world” (to borrow from Shelley’s Alastor, line 715), has sadly passed, but his poetry, criticism, and scholarship remain constant luminaries: a critical and creative voice that will continue a conversation with readers for many ensuing years. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 50, Number 4Fall 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/707041 Views: 115 © 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.