{"id":2578,"date":"2018-09-01T00:17:36","date_gmt":"2018-08-31T23:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=2578"},"modified":"2018-09-01T00:17:36","modified_gmt":"2018-08-31T23:17:36","slug":"an-irish-poet-attains-greatness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2018\/09\/01\/an-irish-poet-attains-greatness\/","title":{"rendered":"An Irish Poet Attains Greatness"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am sticking my neck out to declare: Micheal O\u2019Siadhail\u2019s book-length poem, The Five Quintets,<\/em>\u00a0is the most important work of English-language literature that has been published so far this century. O\u2019Siadhail\u2019s towering achievement melds reflections on the arts, economics, politics, philosophy and, fascinatingly, science into lyrical verse that transfixes the reader. He urges we enter a paradise of compromise, love and engagement, whilst crisscrossing the disabling specialisms that bedevil our time.<\/span><\/p>\n

Inspired in particular by Dante Alighieri\u2019s thirteenth century journey through heaven, hell and purgatory in The Divine Comedy<\/em>, O\u2019Siadhail introduces us to men especially, and women, who have shaped, and distorted, our modernity. The Italian poet himself is channelled, offering to guide O\u2019Siadhail’s journey through hell to \u2018heaven\u2019s vertigo\u2019, \u2018And summing up an era work the seam \/ Between the modern world and its aftermath\u2019.<\/p>\n

T.S Eliot\u2019s influence also lurks in the poem\u2019s title \u2013 an allusion to his The Four Quartets<\/em> \u2013 which, O\u2019Siadhail writes in the introduction, \u2018feels it needed a fifth part\u2019, as it \u2018never really gets to the joy and let-go of an imagined heaven\u2019. The influence of that American poet is held in check, as this literary shark, \u2018demands an absolute \/ To order seas of doubt which rage inside\u2019.<\/p>\n

Moral absolutists are, without fail, scorned in\u00a0O\u2019Siadhail’s schema.\u00a0The heaven which he glimpses is never fixed, but in play, and informed by the principle of uncertainty. Similarly, utopia, \u2018no place\u2019, is a term frequently used to denigrate those theorists whose intellectual pride obscures a vision of an elusive paradise.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Siadhail\u2019s muses are numerous, but \u2018Madame Jazz\u2019, an earlier incarnation, acts as a Virgil-like sidekick throughout.<\/p>\n

Although each sacred book\u2019s a lip-read score,
\nImprovising there is always more;
\nYou jazz on what\u2019s our own and our rapport.<\/em><\/p>\n

Each solo and ensemble of a piece,
\nGrooves and tempos shifting without cease,
\nWe flourish in a syncopated peace.<\/em><\/p>\n

In all our imperfections we advance,
\nTrusting in creation\u2019s free-willed chance;
\nSweet Madam Jazz, in you we are the dance.<\/em><\/p>\n

Her gyrations allow O\u2019Siadhail to fix on a horizon in constant, though not immediately apparent, motion.<\/p>\n

In the final section, we also encounter Dante\u2019s Beatrice, who perhaps best captures the rupture which O\u2019Siadhail\u2019s work seeks to heal:<\/p>\n

You mortals down below can fail to see
\nhow marvels coded in the universe
\nreflect the face of God\u2019s infinity.<\/em><\/p>\n

Too graceless, too constrained, you still immerse
\nyourselves in steps and miss out on the dance \u2013
\nthe scientists and poets don\u2019t converse<\/em><\/p>\n

or celebrate each quantum of advance,
\ndiscovering a heaven\u2019s cameo
\nin God, the gambler\u2019s mix of love and chance. <\/em><\/p>\n

Laurens van der Post wrote: \u2018For me the passion of spirit we call \u201creligion\u201d, and the love of truth that impels the scientist, come from one indivisible source, and their separation in the time of my life was a singularly artificial and catastrophic amputation.\u2019 O\u2019Siadhail\u2019s work may help restore a moral compass to the great scientific adventures, which have brought mastery over planet Earth, but often with unintended, or unacknowledged, costs. Religious, including many poets, in turn, might no longer see themselves as being in opposition to science, but in fruitful communication with its inherent mysteries.<\/p>\n

II \u2013 The badger and the fox.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In the first quintet, Making<\/em>, we meet a host of writers, musicians and artists, who are assigned in haikus (or \u2018saikus\u2019 \u2013 a neologism) an animal or plant spirit. These are followed by carefully crafted sonnets, combining narrative accounts and artists\u2019 voices, channelled through O\u2019Siadhail. He rhapsodises on the achievements of many, but there are stinging observations on the artistic limitations, or myopia, of others.<\/p>\n

Thus, William Wordsworth\u2019s legacy is tainted by a failure to generate the epics he had dreamed of, his Prelude<\/em> represents: \u2018All Foothills to the peaks you never reached\u2019; while Samuel Taylor Coleridge\u2019s \u2018Youth\u2019s promise\u2019 was diminished \u2019in opium\u2019s malaise\u2019.<\/p>\n

That arch-worrier Franz Kafka is consigned to a \u2018sleepless hell\u2019, as O\u2019Siadhail condemns him for feeding \u2018\u2026 the wizened dreams of minds withdrawn \/ Your nightmare\u2019s broken trust denying dawn.\u2019 While Pablo Picasso has become, \u2018A famous for being famous millionaire\u2019, unhinged by fortune and acclaim.<\/p>\n

For others there is reverence, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for never deviating from a desire \u2018to stanch life\u2019s sufferings\u2019, and having, \u2018No truck with any cause but moral truth\u2019. In his compassion we find a \u2018glimpse of paradise\u2019.<\/p>\n

Classical composers including Ludwig van\u00a0Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gustav\u00a0Mahler and J. S. Bach are also celebrated, but Richard Wagner, \u2018a lone wolf\u2019, is condemned for mustering dark nationalistic forces. Elsewhere, O\u2019Siadhail\u2019s George Frederic\u00a0Handel conveys the sublime balance of his oeuvre<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I only want to hold the music\u2019s line
\nA flighty psyche focused on its goal
\nSo every voice can shine but not outshine,
\nFrom all the woven parts create the whole.<\/em><\/p>\n

Painters are less evident among these shades, but his description of Francisco Goya\u2019s \u2018Third of May\u2019 \u2019merits retelling:<\/p>\n

Where fusiliers have turned their nameless back
\nAnd bend to execute their point blank prey;
\nMy lamp of pity lights the victim\u2019s face.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"
The \u2018Third of May\u2019, by Francisco Goya.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Irish readers will be intrigued by his encounters in our literary pantheon. Suitably, W.B. Yeats is depicted as a badger, \u2018the churning digger \/ With its nose close to the ground\u2019. O\u2019Siadhail hails him as \u2018the archpriest of sound\u2019, and, unusually, integrates and adapts many of his lines, such as \u2018Old lecher with a love on every wing\u2019, from the still smouldering Tower<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But there is a stern rebuke for his promotion of eugenics: \u2018scorning base-born products of base beds\u2019, and unwillingness to look beyond a fantastical world that is, \u2018dead and gone \u2026 That perfect past your mind\u2019s own cul de sac\u2019. Instead O\u2019Siadhail urges: \u2018Retrieve best thoughts once shed and then move on\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Characterised as a badger, W.B. Yeats.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

O\u2019Siadhail is similarly conflicted over James Joyce\u2019s legacy, admitting to loving a language \u2018burbling up in play\u2019. From one great linguists to another, O\u2019Siadhail tells him he is as good a reader as, \u2018you\u2019ll get to understand your punning riverrun\u2019, but counters, \u2018I know the charge of words, and yet and yet\u2019.<\/p>\n

He wonders if his fellow Jesuit-educated writer\u2019s works hold, \u2018a microscope that is too small in scale\u2019, and whether, \u2018in the end does anything take flight\u2019. This might come as a relief to those who have baulked at Finnegans Wake\u2019s circumlocutions.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Siadhail is suspicious of a character \u2018so proud and so obsessed\u2019, for whom others are \u2018walk on parts in your world\u2019s play\u2019. He scorns the, \u2018dreamlike doodling of an introvert\u2019. But there is high praise indeed for Molly Bloom\u2019s soliloquy in Ulysses<\/em>, including a playful pun of his own:<\/p>\n

Still once at least, though in a woman\u2019s voice,
\nI didn\u2019t pun or try to be opaque
\nBut spoke my shortest playful work of praise
\nAnd yes, in Molly\u2019s yes I did reJoyce.<\/em><\/p>\n

The other two Irish writers we meet are Patrick Kavanagh, \u2018A kamikaze trusting in God\u2019s wind\u2019, who, \u2018In hungry times\u2019, paid the price\u2019, for being a \u2018peeping Tom who lusts for paradise\u2019; along with praise for Brian Friel\u2019s \u2018impish wit\u2019.<\/p>\n

Notably absent are Seamus Heaney (who has perhaps been canonized prematurely?), and Samuel Beckett. Elsewhere O\u2019Siadhail has criticised the interiority of Modernists, who refused to take responsibility \u2018for shaping a wider meaning\u2019. He continues:<\/p>\n

Apart from the risk of solipsism and plain self-indulgence, there is the risk of turning poetry into a kind of private piety, which ends up marginalising poetry or branding it as some kind of academic pursuit not appropriate to the ordinary reader of books.<\/em><\/p>\n

Refreshingly, however all-encompassing his themes, O\u2019Siadhail\u2019s language is never self-indulgent, and always endeavours to inform.<\/p>\n

III \u2013 \u2018The Dismal Science\u2019<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

O\u2019Siadhail tells the story of the making and undoing of our modernity by theorists and movers and shakers, as he seeks to reshape our current approaches. The self-imposed constraints of metre, and often rhyme, bring a pleasant economy of expression.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Siadhail\u2019s ambition to tell the story of our time in The Five Quintet<\/em> recalls the Roman poet Ovid\u2019s Metamorphosis<\/em>, which draws together the mythologies that informed an understanding of the ancient world\u00a0 in order to forge a new consciousness. Here the Classical titans give way to seminal figures such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx, J. M. Keynes, Milton Friedman and Amartya Sen, along with men of commerce, who are today often vemerated as heroes.<\/p>\n

The bargain struck, the business done,
\nThe dealer\u2019s will and drive for wealth,
\nOur new concern with number one.<\/em><\/p>\n

One self-interested specimen on display is Ireland\u2019s own Michael Fingleton:<\/p>\n

Still bent on short-term deals to boost
\nA bottom line. A bonus-gained,
\nAlready on your way to ruin
\nAll caution to the winds \u2013 who cares?
\nAmbitious tiger burning bright
\nAnd brazen in your riot-run
\nYou do not know the dust you\u2019ll bite.<\/em><\/p>\n

It seems unlikely O\u2019Siadhail sought legal advice on the potential for defamation in this section. It would certainly make for quite a trial to find the poet in the dock against the disgraced banker. A defence of justification should be available for the following lines:<\/p>\n

Small loaners find you\u2019ll go to law
\nTo take your pound of flesh to pay
\nWhat\u2019s owed; for bigger borrowers
\nYou bend or buck to make the rules,
\nIndulge whatever debts occur.<\/em><\/p>\n

There is a nuanced treatment of Adam Smith\u2019s contribution to economic theory. Laissez faire<\/em>, permits \u2018the hidden hand\u2019 to operate, leading to competition which generates efficiencies, but which at all times requires vigilance against \u2018crafty dealers\u2019 in league, \u2018to fix a price and profit by intrigue\u2019.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Siadhail\u2019s \u2018modern mind\u2019 cannot understand, however, Smith\u2019s failure to rail against children being harnessed in black holes \u2018Deep down in Durham\u2019s shafts and pits\u2019. He also points to the irony of merchants, \u2018Whose mean rapacity you taunt\u2019, adopting Smith as their first forebear.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Siadhail has interesting reflections on Robert Malthus, who may yet be vindicated in his prediction that food production capacity will not keep pace with the demand of a growing population:<\/p>\n

Your thesis bites so near the bone.
\nMalthusian views now haunt our thoughts;
\nThese times will know a darker tone.<\/em><\/p>\n

Is this the onset of a devastating Climate Change he is referring to?<\/p>\n

O\u2019Siadhail is conflicted in his appreciation of Karl Marx, hailing him as a visionary who foresees \u2018as no one else had seen\u2019, that four hundred billionaires would hold just half our wealth, alongside the \u2018constant gyres of boom and bust\u2019, apparent in late capitalism.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Karl Marx, ‘a know-all coldness’.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But according to O\u2019Siadhail, the Communism that Marx imagines contains a core failing evident in its designer, \u2018a know-all coldness at your core\u2019. Indeed, being a \u2018know-all\u2019 is an oft-repeated barb, leading to the delusion of utopia. This point is central to O\u2019Siadhail\u2019s diagnosis of what has brewed many of our present troubles. Thus Marx is condemned for failing to conceive of compromise, \u2018Where conflicts would be reconciled\u2019.<\/p>\n

We also meet J.M. Keynes who learns by listening to his peers, and is thus lionised as a \u2018Soft changer, saint of step by step\u2019, who recognises how, often, only government stimuli will lift an economy out of the doldrums:<\/p>\n

The system does not cure itself;
\nSo maybe it needs money lent
\nTo make it flow and multiply<\/em><\/p>\n

Far less favourable is O\u2019Siadhail\u2019s assessment of Milton Friedman, another \u2018know-all\u2019, whose rigour \u2018will room no doubt \/ Your mind demands all black and white\u2019. While acknowledging he served up some neglected thoughts, O\u2019Siadhail chides him for using Keynes\u2019s \u2018one defect\u2019 \u2013 of failing to appreciate the significance of monetary supply \u2013 to justify opposition to all state interference with the \u2018hidden hand\u2019.<\/p>\n

Instead we find: \u2018Free flow finance gives quick-fix gains \/ But blows up bubbles that must burst\u2019, where, \u2018The wily then are winners all\u2019. O\u2019Siadhail plumbs for the Scandinavian laws: \u2018Where weak need not go to the wall\u2019.<\/p>\n

One Scandinavian theorist we meet is Thorstein Veblen, who reveals an acute understanding of why workers are not always sympathetic to Marxist ideas.<\/p>\n

Society does not cohere in hate\u2013
\nAll workers really want to emulate
\nTheir boss \u2013 the weak are would-be rich at heart;
\nIf Marx had not been wrong and me not right
\nThe poor would tear society apart.<\/em><\/p>\n

O\u2019Siadhail sees a need for more than Marxist materialism to meet the challenge of inequality. The height of wisdom arrives from a woman, and \u2018cub economist\u2019, Kathryn Tanner, who finds in the \u2018love-dream born of Bethlehem\u2019 the possibility of mending the distortions of the market place.<\/p>\n

Tanner, through O\u2019Siadhail, says:<\/p>\n

Is this utopian, I hear you ask,
\nA heaven here on earth, a hopeless task,
\nAnother revolution run roughshod?
\nO no! It\u2019s here and now we must uphold
\nThe common right of all to gifts of God.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is perhaps Dietrich Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018Christianity of this world\u2019, grounded in earthly challenges, rather than lofty metaphysics. One might also discern the influence of his intellectual brother-in-arms the theologian David Ford<\/a>.<\/p>\n

IV \u2013 The Art of the Possible<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The next section, entitled Steering<\/em>, meditates on good governance. O\u2019Siadhail decries the fantasists of left and right, while bemoaning \u2018tweedle dee\u2019 and \u2018tweedle dum\u2019 politics, such as we find in Ireland. He warns: \u2018the thieves of power \/ Come noiselessly in nights of apathy.\u2019<\/p>\n

O\u2019Siadhail\u2019s continues to inveigh against \u2018know-all\u2019 attitudes, warning the reader to guard against the real sympathies of utopians.<\/p>\n

Fear ideas that outreach the heart,
\nChilled compassion of the ideologue.
\nWhat purports to pity broken lives
\nOften hides a know-all arrogance
\nThat wants to own the future and the past,
\nSo refuses, starting from the now.
\nGreedy for the perfect all create
\nHells of blood and soil and golden age.<\/em><\/p>\n

Readers might be intrigued by his descriptions of Margaret Thatcher, \u2018Forthright Grantham grocer\u2019s girl\u2019, as an autocrat. Her parvenus<\/em> attitude reflects Thorstein Veblen\u2019s earlier insights into the aspirational, \u201cwould be rich\u201d, working class:<\/p>\n

Some who shin the tall and greasy pole
\nCarry in their bones a sympathy,
\nWant to spare all comers such a climb;
\nOthers vaunt their courage and condemn
\nWeakness they had fought to overcome,
\nSee all frailness as a threat to power.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"
Margaret Thatcher: tearing apart society’s \u2018love-ravelled fabric\u2019.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In O\u2019Siadhail\u2019s account Thatcher is prompted by Keith Joseph, \u2018To rethink all in Milton Friedman\u2019s words\u2019. This leads to the tearing of society\u2019s \u2018love-ravelled fabric\u2019.<\/p>\n

There is also an intriguing description of the arch-networker, Jean Monnet, one of the original architects of the European Community. O\u2019Siadhail traces the current fraying of the Union right back to the failure of Monnet and others to conjure, beyond simply commerce and trade, a European identity, based on \u2018deeper bonds and ties\u2019.<\/p>\n

Perhaps writing in the wake of the Greek and Irish bailouts, O\u2019Siadhail seems wary of \u2018Brussels\u2019 one-fits-all\u2019 approach:<\/p>\n

Starred blue flag so dutifully raised,
\nStill not fluttering in our chambered hearts
\nHeaven is no timeless superstate.<\/em><\/p>\n

In Canto 5 of this section, \u2018A Beckoned Dream<\/em>\u2019, O\u2019Siadhail reveals a political paradise comprising of William Ewart Gladstone, who accepted Irish Home Rule, Mahatma Gandhi, Dag Hammarskjold, the \u2018United Nations\u2019 guiding star of peace\u2019, Nelson Mandela and, less convincingly, former Irish President Mary McAleese, who is commended for building sectarian bridges among \u2018Ghosts of Europe\u2019s once religious wars.\u2019<\/p>\n

I found this choice puzzling as McAleese was more of a figurehead as Irish President, and did less to interrogate the rising tide of inequality in Ireland than her successor Michael D. Higgins. Moreover, McAleese was an electoral candidate (in the 1987 General Election) for Fianna Fail under the corrupt leadership of Charles Haughey, who also tactically rejected the reconciliatory Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, and her Presidential candidature came during the tenure of another tainted figure in Bertie Ahern.<\/p>\n

I would prefer to have seen greater emphasis on environmental responsibility in this cockpit, as humanity stares down the barrel of self-inflicted ecological collapse. Perhaps some will be frustrated by the idea that political change cannot arrive more quickly than in\u00a0\u2018Fractions less imperfect than before\u2019, considering the challenges that now press against us, but his emphasis on the value of dialogue is surely correct: \u2018Gaze-to-gaze in our humanity \/ Enmity we can thaw \u2026 \u2019<\/p>\n

V \u2013 God and Science<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The two final cantos Finding <\/em>and Meaning<\/em>, covering Science and Philosophy, might stretch most readers more than the first three; although O\u2019Siadhail never succumbs to drawing too liberally from his rich pallet of languages and knowledge. It will be intriguing to encounter scientific responses to his account of the great leaps forward in our understanding of the universe.<\/p>\n

Following his rejection of the fixity of political utopias, O\u2019Siadhail sees a cosmos born of Heisenberg\u2019s Uncertainty Principle, as opposed to a \u2018knotty crossword yielded clue by clue\u2019 that is capable of completion. Here we encounter a God that plays dice.<\/p>\n

In Meaning<\/em>, O\u2019Siadhail continues to riff (in Dante\u2019s own terza rima<\/em>) on the unknowableness of the divine:<\/p>\n

Allow our God a purpose not our own
\nand here outside a timeless roundelay
\nwe dance within our fragile ecozone<\/em><\/p>\n

Here we meet the shades of Martin Luther, John\u00a0Calvin, Rene Descartes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and a sneering Friedrich\u00a0Nietzsche, who is condemned for a lack of compassion, and an unwillingness to compromise, yet:<\/p>\n

Despite his detached mind\u2019s strange solitaire,
\nfor all mad Nietzche\u2019s overreaching claims,
\nhis genius shows how humans overbear;<\/em><\/p>\n

Next come Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, Martin\u00a0Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre \u2013 dismissed as a \u2018a braggadocio of angst that sinks \/ to vanish in the nothingness of hell\u2019 \u2013 S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricouer, Said Nursi, and Jean Vanier, who wonders \u2018What if the weak become our first concern \/ what if such love decides our balance sheet\u2019.<\/p>\n

Vanier also offers encouragement to the poet:<\/p>\n

this poem may be a slow fuse to guide
\nthe moments in our psyches\u00a0which allow
\nan amplitude, a deeper second sight.<\/em><\/p>\n

Then Hannah Arendt again condemns:<\/p>\n

Utopians who weave their gossamer
\nideal never see the here and now;
\nfor such far sight the present blur,<\/em><\/p>\n

We also meet O\u2019Siadhail\u2019s first wife, who died some years ago after a long illness:<\/p>\n

In your compassion, Br\u00edd<\/i>, I think I grow
\nand understand how only love can heal;
\nI learn to feel what others undergo.<\/em><\/p>\n

Finally, there is a dreamy vision of Paradise in which\u00a0O\u2019Siadhail travels along a path between two parallel rows of trees each \u2018interwoven with its counterpart\u2019, \u2018in curves of paradox which shape the light\u2019.<\/p>\n

VI \u2013 Poetic Futures<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

O\u2019Siadhail\u2019s The Five Quintets<\/em>\u00a0synthesises many of the great intellectual questions of our time. In so doing O\u2019Siadhail fits Robert Graves\u2019s description of a poet as, \u2018the unsatisfied child who dares to ask the difficult question which arises from the schoolmaster\u2019s answer to his simple question, and then the still more difficult question which arises from that.\u2019 O\u2019Siadhail keeps<\/em> asking the big questions, having refused the easy chair of academia, where poetry often becomes an obscure word game, and a private members\u2019s club. Authentic poetry may still be difficult, but this arises from considering profound questions.<\/p>\n

The length of The Five Quintets<\/em> also poses the question as to whether long form, epic, poetry may come back into vogue.<\/p>\n

Previously, the Canadian literary critic Northrope Frye argued that Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s essay \u2018The Poetic Principle\u2019, published posthumously in 1850, had a \u2018tremendous influence on future poetry\u2019. Poe proposed that a long poem was a contradiction in terms, and that all existing long poems of genuine quality consisted of moments of intense poetic experience, \u2018stuck together with a connective tissue of narrative or argument which was really versified prose.\u2019<\/p>\n

Frye regarded this as preposterous, but a preference for brevity, which may mask a lack of ambition or vision, is still apparent.<\/p>\n

May we revisit a Romantic Age to recover long form poetry, when poets, such as Coleridge and Shelley, were participants in scientific debates? Indeed the word science was only coined in the 1830s. Since then it has become the preserve of specialists.<\/p>\n

\"\"
The master poet. Image (c) Julia Hembree Smith.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I was a little disappointed not to meet the shade of Shelley, who had less than thirty years to impart his genius. Perhaps O\u2019Siadhail shrank from the apparent violence of his near namesake\u2019s earlier pronouncements on the\u00a0\u2018necessity\u2019 of atheism and the revolutionary sentiments of much of his early verse, but over the course of his short life his outlook mellowed.<\/p>\n

Just as Shelley\u2019s challenged vested interests, similarly I suspect The Five Quintets<\/em> will make some readers distinctly uncomfortable: first, it exposes gaping holes in most of our appreciation of the wonders of human thought and creation; secondly, it challenges the social and economic structures we live under; thirdly, it dismisses the delusional quick-fixes of utopians; finally, he challenges a prevalent view that religion and science are irreconcilable.<\/p>\n

I also anticipate that the poem will only be given the credit it deserves in Ireland once it has received the imprimatur of international critics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am sticking my neck out to declare: Micheal O\u2019Siadhail\u2019s book-length poem, The Five Quintets,\u00a0is the most important work of English-language literature that has been published so far this century. O\u2019Siadhail\u2019s towering achievement melds reflections on the arts, economics, politics, philosophy and, fascinatingly, science into lyrical verse that transfixes the reader. He urges we enter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2596,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[197,501,729,2815,3841,4107,4512,7331,9689],"class_list":["post-2578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history-2","category-uncategorized","tag-2018september","tag-and","tag-attains","tag-economics","tag-greatness","tag-history","tag-irish","tag-poet","tag-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2578\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}