Professor Michael O’Neill was a renowned poet and also one of the great modern scholars of Romanticism. No less an authority than Seamus Perry recently called him “one of our leading Shelleyan commentators.” He has died - at the dismayingly young age of 66. You can read the obituary published by the Keats Foundation here: This is a great loss and one which it will not be easy to recover from. In this, the third and final keynote of the Shelley Conference 2017, Professor Michael O’Neill takes us on an extraordinary excursion through Shelley’s prose. Alighting on works such as A Defense of Poetry, On Life, Address on the Death of Princess Charlotte, A Philosophical Review of Reform, On Christianity, and Speculations of Metaphysics, O’Neill conveys a deep and abiding knowledge and love of his subject. He offers common sense, close readings which bring Shelley alive and illustrate what he calls Shelley’s "drama of thought". The first 15 minutes set the scene and once O’Neill hits his stride with a magisterial reading of An Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte, we are comfortably in the hands of a master who takes us on a tour of Shelley’s metaphysical, polemical and religious ruminations.
