Skip to main content

Religious Culture in Modernist Verse

Form, Belief, and Twentieth-Century Poetics

Religious Culture in Modernist Verse cover

Religious Culture in Modernist Verse

Form, Belief, and Twentieth-Century Poetics

Quantity
Pre-order. Available 09 Jul 2026
$135.00 RRP $150.00 Website price saving $15.00 (10%)

Payment for this pre-order will be taken when the item becomes available

This product is usually dispatched within 2-4 weeks following the publication date

Description

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.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Religious Culture in Modernist Poetry and Poetics
1. Mina Loy's Words for Christian Things
2. Sainthood and Gertrude Stein's Invocatory Poetics
3. Distraction in T. S. Eliot's Ash-Wednesday
4. Basil Bunting's “Delight in Transience”
5. Thom Gunn's Christian Icons and the Paradox of Memorial
Conclusion: New Directions for Religion in Modern(ist) Verse
Notes
Bibliography

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 09 Jul 2026
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Pages 192
ISBN 9781666961904
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations 5 b/w illus
Dimensions 229 x 152 mm
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

ONLINE RESOURCES

Bloomsbury Collections

This book is available on Bloomsbury Collections where your library has access.

Related Titles

Get 30% off in the May sale - for one week only

Environment: Staging