Michael O'Neill (academic)

Michael O'Neill (born 1953 in Aldershot, Hampshire) is an English poet, and academic, specialising in the Romantic period and post-war poetry.

A graduate of Exeter College, Oxford, O'Neill has lectured at Durham University since 1979, now holding the title of Professor. He is currently 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 have been on the topic of Romantic literature, of which his most notable single-authored academic works are 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 is the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley, about whom he has published several books, chapters and journal articles, as well as writing Shelley's entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

In addition, he has edited and co-edited several important works on Romantic and post-Romantic literature and poetry, including Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Blackwell, 2007), A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (Routledge, 2004), Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, Including Poetry, Prose and Drama (Oxford University Press, 2003) and Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide (Clarendon Press, 1998).

He is the general editor of Blackwell's Guide to Criticism series, for which he is currently composing a volume on modernist poetry. He also co-founded Poetry Durham, which he edited between 1982 and 1994.

In addition to his academic career, O'Neill is an award-winning published poet, having been awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 1983 and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 1990. He is best known for his collection The Stripped Bed (1990).

• 1983 Eric Gregory Award
• 1990 Cholmondeley Award