Religious Culture in Modernist Verse

Annarose F. Steinke offers a look into the nuanced treatments of religion in modernism and modernist poetry by pairing T.S. Eliot with Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Basil Bunting, and Thom Gunn. Steinke explores how these five poets, who subscribe to a range of personal beliefs from atheism to orthodox Christianity, display a fascination with religious iconography, ritual, and liturgy. Each places religious and poetic forms into dialogue in order to test the limits of the other. Some poems afford a space to think through the problems and failings inherent to religious belief and practice in modern life. Yet others engage religious language, ritual, and iconography to expose, negotiate, and parse out the terms under which poetic language can make spiritual life possible and sustainable in modernity. In all cases, the poetry focuses intensely on the texts, cultures, and objects of religious practice to ultimately question what makes poetic form itself believable.