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23 - Sacred Ground: Orthodoxy, Poetry and Religious Change
- Edited by Suzanne Hobson, Queen Mary University of London, Andrew Radford, University of Glasgow
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 20 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 January 2023, pp 373-388
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Summary
IN 1920, The Vision, the house journal of the Anglo-Catholic organisation the Association for Promoting Retreats (APR), printed the following request on behalf of the society: ‘Give us a Retreat House on the outskirts of every town in England. In two generations we will show you a Church revived in vision and power and a nation with a new outlook upon religion.’ The idea of an Anglicanism diminished in ‘vision and power’ and in need of revival is in conversation with the sociological narrative of secularisation. One version of this story describes how control of several important institutions had been wrested from the churches by secular states. No longer required to interact with religious institutions as a matter of everyday life, many one-time church members drifted from their congregations, drastically reducing documented religious affiliation.
Various accounts have sought to situate modernism within this broader story, working to overcome the often unstated assumption that modernism begins where religion ends. By drawing attention to their sustained engagement with the occult, Leon Surette has questioned what was formerly the received wisdom that modernists, with a few notable exceptions, represented the vanguard of a secular ideology. Pericles Lewis, crystallising a number of arguments about post-Romantic literature and the modernist epiphany, has presented modernism as an endeavour, figuratively speaking, to repurpose otherwise defunct church buildings; in this reading, modernism is not so much an agent of secularisation as at once its beneficiary and critic. It fills the gap left by organised religion, channelling the emotions and pursuing the concerns that were once the preserve of religious traditions. While secularisation followed an inescapable logic, the experience of those who formerly filled the pews was not forgotten. Modernist texts undertook a form of ministry. Centring her discussion on early twentieth-century depictions of angels, Suzanne Hobson, too, sees modernist literature as a feature of a changed religious landscape represented by a ‘complex and variegated pattern of belief and disbelief’; in this story, modernist depictions of the angel are simultaneously shaped by wider shifts in cultural attitudes to religion and agents of the broader process ‘by which orthodox religion slides towards [either] magical […] beliefs […] [or] an everyday or secular register’.
Transmuting F. H. Bradley: T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards a Theory of Poetry
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- By Jamie Callison, University of Bergen, Norway
- John D. Morgenstern
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- Book:
- The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 04 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 04 July 2017, pp 99-113
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Summary
In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot famously glossed lines at the climax of the poem with a quotation from F. H. Bradley that ends, “In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.” For a number of critics, the Bradleian text serves as a hermeneutic key not only to the concerns of the poem, but also to Eliot's wider relationship with the philosopher—both having been seen as reflections on a struggle with solipsism. Nevertheless, the quotation itself is taken from an argument that Bradley reviews and ultimately rejects; Eliot's inclusion of a text that Bradley repudiates raises immediate questions about the relationship between the two figures. The fact that Eliot latched on to an argument that Bradley rejected suggests a degree of antagonism between the two writers. Eliot's allusion to Bradley in The Waste Land thus raises more questions than it answers.
The complicated relationship between literary and philosophical work was one of Eliot's great critical themes, informing his various and varied accounts of Dante, metaphysical poetry, and Shakespeare. It was an interest that doubtlessly had roots in the accidents and nature of his education, having been, at Harvard, an aspiring poet and philosopher and having studied under the Spanish philosopher George Santayana, author of Three Philosophical Poets (1910). In keeping with a category that Eliot himself outlined, the appearance of Bradley in The Waste Land might be seen as an example of a poet making poetic “use” of a philosophical idea whether or not he believes in it—a practice that Eliot saw exemplified in the work of Donne and Shakespeare.
While Eliot's interpretation of Bradley's philosophy—what Eliot took from Bradley and where disagreements between the two are to be found—has been a focal point for Eliot scholars, my own account uses archival sources to take a snapshot of Eliot reading Bradley. I draw on H. J. Jackson's account of the active, engaged, and often confrontational nature of reading as outlined in Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (2001), and focus on aspects of Bradley's text that niggled at Eliot and encouraged the graduate student to counter the older man's positions in the margins of the printed text.