Michael O'Neill (academic)


Michael O'Neill was an English poet and scholar, specialising in the Romantic period and post-war poetry. He published four volumes of original poetry; his academic writing was praised as "beautifully and lucidly written".

Academic career

A graduate of Exeter College, Oxford, O'Neill had lectured at Durham University since 1979, holding the title of Professor. He was on the editorial boards of four journals, Romanticism, Romanticism on the Net, the Keats-Shelley Review and The Wordsworth Circle, as well as being a Fellow of the English Association and on the editorial board of the academic website Romantic Circles.

Publications

His most significant publications were on the topic of Romantic literature, of which his most notable single-authored academic works were his 1997 book Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem and his 2007 book The All-Sustaining Air, which explores the influence of Romantic poetry on poets from Yeats to Roy Fisher.
One of his particular fields of expertise was the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley, about whom he published several books, chapters and journal articles, as well as writing Shelley's entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. He published a facsimile and transcription of two MS copies of Shelley's The Defence of Poetry, praised as "a valuabe, and ideally executed, contribution to dedicated Shelley scholarship".
In addition, he edited and co-edited several important works on Romantic and post-Romantic literature and poetry, including Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on the Poems of W. B. Yeats, Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, Including Poetry, Prose and Drama and Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide.
He was the general editor of Blackwell's Guide to Criticism series, for which he was composing a volume on modernist poetry. He also co-founded Poetry Durham, which he edited between 1982 and 1994.

Poetry

In addition to his academic career, O'Neill was a poet and was awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 1983 and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 1990. He published four volumes, all with ARC Publications. His last poetry collection, Crash and Burn, in which he writes about his battle with cancer, was published posthumously in April 2019.

Awards

Academic

Monographs