My recently published book, Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period, takes as its subject the many and surprising points of contact between modernist poetry and Christian theology in the 1930s and 1940s. During these years, theology underwent profound changes – Karl Barth re-oriented the field towards revelation, while Jacques Maritain helped create a Thomism for the twentieth century – and these theological shifts informed the work of several of the period’s most essential poets. T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, David Jones: all were sensitive readers of modern theology, and all took on large-scale theological topics in their poetry. Eliot’s brilliant Four Quartets, for example, emerges from Barthian debates about the Incarnation, while Jones’s equally masterful The Anathemata engages with twentieth-century sacramental theology.
As someone who reads both poetry and theology for pleasure, this was a dream topic – so much so that, at various times, I worried that I was projecting my own interests back onto an earlier period! But then I’d look again at the archives of The Criterion, the literary magazine that Eliot edited, and remind myself that I really was onto something. In that magazine, Barth was discussed side-by-side with Virginia Woolf, Thomas Aquinas with W. B. Yeats. What a time to be alive! I hope that my book, written for both general readers and scholars of modernism, gives a sense of the period’s vitality – the vitality of its poetry, the vitality of its theology and the vitality of the conversation between the two.
Anthony Domestico '13 Ph.D. is an assistant professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY and the books columnist for Commonweal. He is an active member of the STM community.
