Anglo-Catholic in Religion: T.S. Eliot and Christianity

Barry Spurr¿s eagerly-awaited, definitive study of T.S. Eliot¿s Anglo-Catholic belief and practice shows how the poet¿s religion shaped his life and work for almost forty years, until his death in 1965. The author examines Eliot¿s formal adoption of Anglo-Catholicism, in 1927, as the culmination of his intellectual, cultural, artistic, spiritual and personal development to that point. This book presents the first detailed analysis of the unique influence that Anglo-Catholicism¿s doctrinal and devotional principles, and its social teaching, had on Eliot¿s poetry, plays, prose and personal life. An informed presentation and discussion of Anglo-Catholicism at the time of Eliot¿s conversion and through the subsequent decades of his Christian faith and practice. Significant new material from correspondence and diaries which sheds light on Eliot¿s thought, poetry and prose. This book is essential reading for all scholars and readers of T.S. Eliot and his circle; for students and devotees of Anglo-Catholicism, and scholars of the interaction between literature and theology, especially in the twentieth century. It will also be of use to senior and Honours-level undergraduates and postgraduate research students working in the fields of Modernism and its principles and belief systems, and for students of religion, especially Western Christianity and Anglicanism.

Barry Spurr is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Sydney. He has published extensively on Renaissance and Modernist poetry, religious literature and liturgical language. He is the author of books on studying poetry, Lytton Strachey's prose, poetry about the Virgin Mary, and Anglican and Roman Catholic liturgical language reform.