A Twenty-First Century Masterpiece: Micheal O’Siadhail, The Five Quintets

Rarely does one come across a new literary work so momentous, so breathtakingly brilliant both in content and in form that one knows after the proverbial fifty pages that one is confronting a work of epochal genius. Yet this is precisely what many of the first readers of The Five Quintets have recognized, and I candidly confess my accord with their judgment. In a gesture toward assuring my readers that my high praise is not erratic, a few critical comments from others may assist. Though Anthony Domestico in Commonweal rightly describes this as “an almost impossibly ambitious book,” his praise for O’Siadhail’s extraordinary poetic prowess and intellectual achievement has been widely echoed. Playwright Brian Friel declares himself “in awe of . . . the magnitude . . . the daring . . . and the easy competence” of Five Quintets; Cahir O’Doherty calls it “a new cornerstone of civilization . . . dazzling in its achievement.” Frank Armstrong calls it “the most important book of English language literature published so far this century,” while prominent public figures, including Nobel laureates, leading scientists and theologians including N. T. Wright, Stanley Hauerwas, Peter Ochs, David Ford, and Jeremy Begbie, not to mention public figures such as Jean Vanier and Mary McAleese, former President of Ireland, have chimed in, each commenting from the perspective of their own métier or discipline. This book of poetry is an enormous, epic review of modernity, engaging four centuries of artists, economists, political theorists, scientific superstars, and finally, philosophers and theologians. It is that rarest of accomplishments in our hypertrophic, fragmented culture—a genuinely polymathic work, Christian in its aspiration, but like the Four Quartets of T. S. Eliot it deliberately recalls, graced with ecumenical insights.

While we think of the nineteenth century as the last age of the English long poem (e.g. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Browning’s Paracelsus and Ring and the Book, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha and Courtship of Miles Standish), the twentieth century saw three monumental essays toward the form, namely David Jones’s epic Anathemata (1952), W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety (1948), and, perhaps most memorably of all, T. S. Eliot’s briefer magnum opus, Four Quartets (1935–42). The nineteenth-century long poems are structured as historical narratives; they tell a story which, though marked by psychological interest and development, still draws on Greek, Roman, and medieval predecessors, and seeks to memorialize the past. Jones, Auden, and Eliot famously forego narrative expectations in order to probe more deeply their troubled consciousness, reasonably judged by each, in his own way, to be a representative anxiety. Stream of consciousness and fitful dreams characterize the work of Jones and Auden; in Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” fourth of his quartets, though beginning as one “suspended in time,” the poet’s persona seeks to make use of memory, in particular of spiritual history, to announce a breakthrough of the apparent prison of ever-recycling time—a kairos of the Holy Spirit into which grace he can yield up his time-bound fears.

Micheal O’Siadhail, as of now and with this book surely the greatest epic poet of our own century, is familiar with all of these. He nevertheless departs from their models; he neither narrates a story nor probes his own or even our time’s anxieties. Rather, he plunges through time into bold conversation with the famous dead. His interlocutors, drawn from four centuries of largely European intellectual and spiritual history, are for him the essential makers of the world we live in. Far longer than any of the predecessor poems named here, his work is a tour de force poetic review of artistic, intellectual, social, political, scientific, and theological contributions since the Reformation. The result is a searching, brilliant analysis of modernity, neither fully an apologia nor entirely a critique, but in the end a Catholic and ecumenical vision of...