Annarose F Steinke: Religious Culture in Modernist Verse, Gebunden

Klappentext

Annarose F. Steinke offers a look into the nuanced treatments of religion in modernism, and modernist poetry in particular, by pairing Eliot with Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Basil Bunting, and Thom Gunn.

Steinke explores how these five poets, subscribing to a range of personal beliefs from atheism to orthodox Christianity, display a fascination with religious iconography, ritual, and liturgy while placing religious and poetic forms into dialogue as each tests the limits of the other. Some of the poems analyzed afford a space to think through the problems and failings inherent to religious belief and practice in modern life. Yet in other instances, these poets engage religious language, ritual, and iconography to expose, negotiate, and parse out the terms under which poetic language can make some kind of spiritual life possible and sustainable in modernity. In all of these cases, the poetry focuses intensely on the texts, cultures, and objects of religious practice, ultimately, I argue, to question what makes poetic form itself believable.