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The All-Sustaining Air
Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900
Michael O'Neill
224 pages
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234x156mm
978-0-19-929928-7
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Hardback
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27 September 2007
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- Covers an impressive range of poets, including Eliot, Stevens, Bishop, Heaney, Muldoon, Mahon, Hill, and Hughes
- Subtle, sensitive, and close readings of many important poems bring them alive
- Finds meaning in poetry by approaching it as a form of literary criticism - a rewarding alternative to predominantly theoretical accounts
- Deals with many challenging twentieth- and twenty-first century poets, giving readers fresh access to numerous 'difficult' poems
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 'Esthétique 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.Readership: Academics teaching and researching in Romantic, twentieth-century and twenty-first-century poetry and British, American and Irish poetry.
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Michael O'Neill, Department of English, Durham University
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"The All-Sustaining Air...suggests the literary persistence of Romantic norms in British, Irish, and American poetry since the early 1900s, primarily by dwelling on the image of "air." His angle on W. H. Auden, in particular, illustrates the complex and subtle response of modern attempts to renew Romantic lyricism in a post-Romantic world." - Larry H. Peer, Prism(s) "The All-Sustaining Air continues [O'Neill's] commitment to the importance of close reading and sustained attention to the detail of poetics. The book opens with a superb chapter that takes the Romantic use of 'air' and runs with it...The book is as important for Romanticists who neatly divide their own period from what follows as it is for twentieth-century
scholars who too lazily read the work of modern poets as rejecting a conservative or bombastic Romantic paradigm." - David Stewart, The Year's Work in English Studies "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] has published previously on the question of 'Poetry As Criticism', and The All-Sustaining Air succeeds in animating the Bloomian proposition of influence as a form of critical re-writing, with a close attention to the mutuality of disciplines" - Sarah Bennett, Notes and Queries "O'Neill's readings across a great range of poets and poems are wonderfully intricate and sophisticated, inward with the poetry discussed, alert to
hidden allusion and predictably subtle about formal choice and nuance." - Steve Matthews, BARS Bulletin & Review "a stunning array of sophisticated associations to poets and poetic outcomes...The All-Sustaining Air...can sustain ...critique, even invite it, because it succeeds so completely in laying out the lineaments of a tradition and does do by that most convincing of methods, the celebration of the poems that comprise it, through careful, imaginative, even poetic, close readings." - Jeffrey C. Robinson, The Wordsworth Circle "Air, but never hot air, is everywhere in this cleverly written, eloquent book that is so aware of word-play and the cosmos of echoes." - Guy Cuthbertson, Keats-Shelley
Review "inspiring ... O'Neill ... employs "double responsiveness" by reading poetry "as literary criticism", by allowing the poem to be the "place where the finest and most nuanced reading of a previous poem or poetry occurs" ... One could not wish for a more attuned, erudite guide to these poems than O'Neill." - Heidi Thomson, Modern Language Review "appealing and suggestive...This excellent book captures the spirit of Romanticism by exploring the ways in which post-Romantic poets, from William Butler Yeats to the present, have used, contested, and reworked Romantic poetry." - Ann C. Colley, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 "[an] absorbing study... a pleasure to read. Its subtitle speaks of "legacies and
renewals", and the book's own commitment to renewals of various kinds should ensure it a sustaining afterlife in future studies of Romantic and modern poetry." - Matthew Bevis, Review of English Studies "a fine demonstration that literary criticism may itself acquire some of the virtues of poetry, and nowhere more compellingly than in its astonishing first chapter ... To read this book is to have one's preconceptions challenged on almost every page. ... It is a book that restores one's faith in literary criticism." - Richard Cronin, Romanticism
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Introduction: 'Original Response'
1: 'The All-Sustaining Air': Variations on a Romantic Metaphor
2: 'A Vision of Reality': Mid-to-Late Yeats
3: 'Dialectic Ways': T. S. Eliot and Counter-Romanticism
4: 'The Guts of the Living': Auden and Spender in the 1930s
5: 'The Death of Satan': Stevens's `Esthétique du Mal', Evil, and the Romantic Imagination
6: 'Shining in Modest Glory': Post-Romantic Strains in Kavanagh, Heaney, Mahon, and Carson
7: : 'Just Another Twist in the Plot': Paul Muldoon's Madoc
8: 'Deep Shocks of Recognition' and 'Gutted' Romanticism: Geoffrey Hill and Roy Fisher
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