Five Great Odes

Paul Claudel’s Five Great Odes constitutes one of the great twentieth-century achievements in lyric poetry. Equally earthy and prayerful, the gathered windfall of erotic and religious crises in the poet’s life, perennially and universally relevant in their ecological and sacramental vision, the Odes deserve to be celebrated alongside T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. The Five Great Odes are rendered here in English for the first time in more than fifty years.