This book argues that Percy Shelley's developing capacity to accommodate and explore conflict lies at the heart of his poetic achievement. Focusing particularly on the poetry's language, tones, and imaginative life, O'Neill offers lucid and original readings of Alastor, "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and "Mont Blanc", Julian and Maddalo, The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, The Witch of Atlas, Epipsychidion, and The Triumph of Life. Throwing fresh light on the experience of reading Shelley, the book is a sympathetic yet discriminating discussion of a poet who has too often been the object of uncritical admiration or automatic dislike.

The Human Mind's Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley's Poetry

Literature & Fiction

O'Neill, Michael

British & Irish

Oxford University Press

This book explores the "self-conscious poem" - that is, a poem concerned with poetry that displays awareness of itself as poetry - in the work of the major Romantic poets, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Michael O'Neill's readings freshly illuminate the imaginative distinction of many famous and often-studied poems, and revalue less regarded works. An extended coda looks at some post-Romantic poets, particularly Yeats, Stevens, Auden, and Clampitt, in the light of the book's central theme.

Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem

Clarendon Press

Shelleyan Reimaginings and Influence: New Relations

Through attuned close readings, this volume brings out the imaginative and formal brilliance of Percy Bysshe Shelley's writing as it explores his involvement in processes of dialogue and influence. Shelley recognizes that poetic individuality is the reward of connectedness with other writers and cultural influences. 'A great Poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight', he writes, 'and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight' (A Defence of Poetry). He is among the major Romantic poetic exponents and theorists of influence, because of his passionately intelligent commitment to the onward dissemination of ideas and feelings, and to the unpredictable ways in which poets position themselves and are culturally positioned between past and future. The book has a tripartite structure. The first three chapters seek to illuminate his response to representative texts, figures, and themes that constitute the triple pillars of his cultural inheritance: the classical world (Plato); Renaissance poetry (Spenser and Milton); Christianity and, in particular, the concept of deity and the Bible. The second and major section of the book explores Shelley's relations and affinities with, as well as differences from, his immediate predecessors and contemporaries: Hazlitt and Lamb; Wordsworth; Coleridge; Southey; Byron; Keats (including the influence of Dante on Shelley's elegy for his fellow Romantic) and the great painter J. M. W. Turner, with whom he is often linked. The third section considers Shelley's reception by later nineteenth-century writers, figures influenced by and responding to Shelley including Beddoes, Hemans, Landon, Tennyson, and Swinburne. A coda discusses the body of critical work on Shelley produced by A. C. Bradley, a figure who stands at the threshold of twentieth-century thinking about Shelley.

History & Criticism

The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900

Drawn from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, the title of this book suggests the cultural and literary persistence of the Romantic in the work of many British, American, and Irish poets since 1900. Allowing for and celebrating the multiple, even fractured nature of Romantic legacies, Michael O'Neill focuses on the creative impact of Romantic poetry on twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry. Individual chapters embrace numerous authors and texts, and span different cultures; the intention is not the forlorn hope of completeness, but the wish to open up possibilities and intersections, and there is a strong sense throughout of poetry serving as a subtle and profound form of literary criticism. A wide-ranging introduction analyses the persistence of the Romantic in poets such as Ted Hughes, Wilfred Owen, Robert Frost, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, and others, and sets the scene for subsequent discussions. Chapter 1 dwells on images of 'air', using these to understand the efforts of a number of twentieth-century poets to 'sustain' Romanticism, or forms of it. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Yeats and Eliot, respectively, the latter apparently shunning the Romantic, the former seeming to embrace it, but both responding with subtlety and individuality to the Romantic bequest. Chapter 4 argues that Wallace Stevens's 'Esthetique du Mal' should be read as a work that illuminates the writings of the major Romantics, especially about evil and suffering. Chapter 5 discusses the work of W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, exploring the complex response of both poets to the Romantic, Auden complicated in his post-Romantic attitudes, Spender daring in his attempts to renew a Romantic lyricism in a post-Romantic age. Chapter 6 returns to a broader sweep as it investigates the response of a range of contemporary poets from Northern Ireland, including Heaney, Kavanagh, Mahon, and Carson, to Romantic poetry. Chapter 7 sustains the Irish connection, discussing Paul Muldoon's dealings with Byron and other Romantics, especially in Madoc. And Chapter 8 focuses on Geoffrey's Hill's tense and tensed relations with Romantic poetry, and on Roy Fisher's sense of being a 'gutted Romantic', in order to illustrate two diverse ways of being post-Romantic in contemporary culture.

Drawn from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, the title of this book suggests the cultural and literary persistence of the Romantic in the work of many British, American, and Irish poets since 1900. Allowing for and celebrating the multiple, even fractured nature of Romantic legacies, Michael O'Neill focuses on the creative impact of Romantic poetry on twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry. Individual chapters embrace numerous authors and texts, and span different cultures; the intention is not the forlorn hope of completeness, but the wish to open up possibilities and intersections, and there is a strong sense throughout of poetry serving as a subtle and profound form of literary criticism. A wide-ranging introduction analyses the persistence of the Romantic in poets such as Ted Hughes, Wilfred Owen, Robert Frost, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, and others, and sets the scene for subsequent discussions. Chapter 1 dwells on images of 'air', using these to understand the efforts of a number of twentieth-century poets to 'sustain' Romanticism, or forms of it. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Yeats and Eliot, respectively, the latter apparently shunning the Romantic, the former seeming to embrace it, but both responding with subtlety and individuality to the Romantic bequest. Chapter 4 argues that Wallace Stevens's 'Esthetique du Mal' should be read as a work that illuminates the writings of the major Romantics, especially about evil and suffering. Chapter 5 discusses the work of W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, exploring the complex response of both poets to the Romantic, Auden complicated in his post-Romantic attitudes, Spender daring in his attempts to renew a Romantic lyricism in a post-Romantic age. Chapter 6 returns to a broader sweep as it investigates the response of a range of contemporary poets from Northern Ireland, including Heaney, Kavanagh, Mahon, and Carson, to Romantic poetry. Chapter 7 sustains the Irish connection, discussing Paul Muldoon's dealings with Byron and other Romantics, especially in Madoc. And Chapter 8 focuses on Geoffrey's Hill's tense and tensed relations with Romantic poetry, and on Roy Fisher's sense of being a 'gutted Romantic', in order to illustrate two diverse ways of being post-Romantic in contemporary culture.

Auden, Macneice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry

Through close analysis of the major poems written during the 1930s by W.H.Auden, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, this study highlights the often creative quarrels in their work between a sense of poetry as autonomous art and an anti-modernist desire to communicate. This book does not allow the poetry to be subsumed within some impersonal historical "Zeitgeist", instead it concentrates on the issue of poetic achievement, focusing an individual poems. Michael O'Neill is the author of "The Human Mind's Imaginings" and "Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life" and Gareth Reeves is the author of "T.S.Eliot, A Virgilian Poet".

Auden, MacNeice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry

Hickman, Neil

Reeves, Gareth

Palgrave HE UK

The debate over European integration is a central issue in the study of contemporary Europe. This book guides the reader through the most important of the integration theories and academic literature on this topic.

The Politics of European Integration: A Reader (Global Environment Change)

Foreign & International Law

Routledge

The European Union (EU) Constitution was one of the most important developments in the history of the EU, aiming to make the EU more transparent, relevant and accountable to the citizens of its member states. Current anxieties over the pace and direction of EU integration place this comprehensive study at the forefront of the EU governance debate. O’Neill goes far beyond a simple account of the EU Constitution, focussing also on the response to the current crisis of confidence between the Union and its citizens and how those in power have responded to the challenge. Making a substantial contribution to literature on the EU, key discussion points include: <ul>
<li>The political crisis behind the Constitution</li> <li>The power politics at work in the negotiations</li> <li>How the Constitution affects EU policymaking</li> <li>The impact on the citizens of the EU</li> </ul> This is essential reading for all those wishing to understand the background to one of the key areas within European Politics. Michael O’Neill is Jean Monnet Professor in EU Politics at Nottingham Trent University.

The Struggle for the European Constitution: A Past and Future History (Routledge Advances in European Politics)

Constitutional Law

The European Union (EU) Constitution was one of the most important developments in the history of the EU, aiming to make the EU more transparent, relevant and accountable to the citizens of its member states. Current anxieties over the pace and direction of EU integration place this comprehensive study at the forefront of the EU governance debate.   O’Neill goes far beyond a simple account of the EU Constitution, focussing also on the response to the current crisis of confidence between the Union and its citizens and how those in power have responded to the challenge.   Making a substantial contribution to literature on the EU, key discussion points include:    The political crisis behind the Constitution   The power politics at work in the negotiations   How the Constitution affects EU policymaking   The impact on the citizens of the EU   This is essential reading for all those wishing to understand the background to one of the key areas within European Politics.  Michael O’Neill is Jean Monnet Professor in EU Politics at Nottingham Trent University.

The Struggle for the European Constitution (Routledge Advances in European Politics)

The perfect gift for your favorite poet or lover of poetry! From Old English to the poetry of the present, discover how a poem's form shapes and informs the reader's and writer's experience.

Poetic Form: An Introduction (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

Hurley, Michael D.

Cambridge University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by O'Neill, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by O'Neill, Michael

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by O'Neill, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Human Mind's Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley's Poetry

Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem

Shelleyan Reimaginings and Influence: New Relations

The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900

The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900

Auden, MacNeice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry

The Politics of European Integration: A Reader (Global Environment Change)

The Struggle for the European Constitution: A Past and Future History (Routledge Advances in European Politics)

The Struggle for the European Constitution (Routledge Advances in European Politics)

Poetic Form: An Introduction (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)