Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The topic of this chapter may seem unnecessary in a book about writing after modernism. As quintessential modernist T. S. Eliot put it in 1932, more than a decade in advance of the date that frames this anthology, “for the great majority of people who love poetry, ‘ religious poetry’ is a variety of minor poetry” (1936: 96). The very term religious poetry suggests the secularizing effects of modernization since the Enlightenment; the Middle Ages would have found it tautological. Yet it is precisely its antithetical relationship to modernism that has, in highly revised versions, given religion a new and critical relevance for postwar poetry. I need to unpack that statement rather quickly here, moving through an abbreviated consideration of everything from the renegotiation of Judeo-Christian orthodoxies to the recovery of ancient forms of mystical revolt to counter the modern era's invented certainties. Some forms of postwar religious revival are relatively predictable and reactionary; others coincide with the crises and opportunities of a post-colonial or devolving “kingdom.” Still others offer so sympathetic a response to broader mid-century philosophy that they begin to resemble deconstructive theory. Taken together, these poetries evidence what Gianni Vattimo would, by the century's end, call “the return of religion in our culture” (1999: 25), or the dawn of a post-rational, ... log in or subscribe to read full text