Trinity Hall, Cambridge

T. S. Eliot claimed that 'the only cure for Romanticism is to analyse it'. And yet

, as Michael O'Neill observes in his absorbing study, 'Romantic poetry itself is often its own severest analyst'. The All-Sustaining Air deftly explores the ways in which twentieth-century poets responded to both the confidence and the hesitancy of Romantic poetry, and shows how their responses were indebted to their forbears even as they sought to forge their own styles and Juicy Couture Necklaces voices. The story this book tells is not so much one about the anxiety of influence, then, but about the ways in which anxiety might be an influence and, crucially, about the ways in which anxiety could find itself re-shaped into other, less fraught kinds of feeling through poetic encounter and exchange.

Modern engagements with the legacies of Romanticism were creative as well as critical, and O'Neill helpfully conceives analysis not so much as the catalyst for a 'cure', but as the grounds for a newly enriched sense of conversation. Indeed, one of many strengths of O'Neill's approach is the way it allows us to develop a more nuanced sense of the kind of conversation that might take place within the work of one poet by asking us to attend to the conversations that occur between different poets. Moreover, his book is not tied to any monolithic sense of what the Romantic is, and part of its larger aim is to show how Romanticism shapes itself in the light of later re-imaginings.

The All-Sustaining Air acts as a valuable, vital sequel to O'Neill's superb work in Romanticism and The Self-Conscious Poem (1997). The earlier book had included a coda on responses to Romanticism in the work of Yeats, Stevens, Auden, and Amy Clampitt, and the new study begins with Yeats, before casting its net widely to look at the work of Eliot, Auden, Spender, Stevens, Kavanagh, Heaney, Mahon, Carson, Muldoon, Geoffrey Hill, and Roy Fisher. O'Neill envisages Romantic poets as ' "sustaining" a supply of imaginative oxygen to later poems', and one of the most important suppliers of this oxygen is Shelley. The book's capacious Juicy Couture Watch opening chapter considers variations on a metaphor to tease out what is at stake; the 'all-sustaining air' comes from Prometheus Unbound, a poem which is 'an exercise in deep breathing... Shelleyan "air" is always ready to rhyme with "despair" as in lone's lines, even if it is "despair | Mingled with love and then dissolved in sound"'. Such commentary is characteristic of O'Neill's willingness to attend to the dual inflections of the Romantic tradition, for the air may be both a rapt, oracular song and an airy nothing.

Trinity Hall, Cambridge

By: endeavor19

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