Michael O'Neill

Michael O'Neill (1953 – 21 December 2018) 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 (Oxford University Press), 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 (in the series The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts<ref>{{cite journal |title=Reviewed Work(s): The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts. Volume XVI, ...Volume XVII, ...Volume XX |first=William |last=Keach |journal=Keats-Shelley Journal |volume=45 |year=1996 |pages=199–201 |url=http://www.jstor.com/stable/30210347}}</ref>), praised as "a valuable, and ideally executed, contribution to dedicated Shelley scholarship".