SOURCE: “‘And All Things Seem Only One’: The Shelleyan Lyric,” in Percy Bysshe Shelley: Bicentenary Essays, edited by Kelvin Everest, D. S. Brewer, 1992, pp. 115-31.

In the following essay, O’Neill surveys the complex character of Shelley's lyric poetry.

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‘It is only when under the overruling influence of some one state of feeling, either actually experienced, or summoned up in almost the vividness of reality by a fervid imagination, that he writes as a great poet’.¹ J. S. Mill's observation about Shelley, which he thought held particularly true of the poet's ‘lyrical poems’,² may seem to be borne out by the ‘fervid’ intensity of poems such as ‘O World, O Life, O Time’ or ‘The Flower That Smiles Today’. But in both these late pieces the poet's ‘labour of simplification’³ does not exclude complication or nuance. In the latter poem image and abstraction combine suggestively, inviting speculation about...