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Religious Culture in Modernist Verse

Form, Belief, and Twentieth-Century Poetics

Religious Culture in Modernist Verse cover

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.

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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 11 Jun 2026
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Pages 160
ISBN 9798216255130
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations 5 b/w illus
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Annarose F. Steinke

Annarose F. Steinke is Associate Professor of Engl…

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