Transmuting F. H. Bradley: T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards a Theory of Poetry

This essay affords the first extensive reading of T.S. Eliot’s marginalia to F. H. Bradley’s ‘Appearance and Reality.’ I draw attention to a shift in Eliot’s way of doing philosophy over the course of his year at Merton College, Oxford, 1914-1915; a shift that had consequences for the ways in which Eliot read or re-read Bradley. Drawing on Heather Jackson’s work on marginalia, I argue that Eliot’s notes on Bradley provide a window on this act of reading. In particular, I suggest that Eliot’s quibble with Bradley’s use of the word “transmute” – evident in the marginalia – opens up an extended conversation between the two authors and within which “Tradition and the Individual Talent” can be located. I offer not so much a new account of Bradley’s influence on Eliot as an enriched picture of the manner in which influence can be said to be exerted

Dissociating psychology : religion, inspiration, and T. S. Eliot's subliminal mind

Author's accepted version (post-print).Using archival resources, I outline T. S. Eliot's fascination with the porous borders between science and religion. I show how the notion of a dissociated consciousness developed by the French psychologist Pierre Janet informed the "dissociation of sensibility," and how Janet's idea, repackaged as the subliminal mind and used by psychologists of religion such as William James, shaped the account of the creative process developed in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. I suggest this contextualization of Eliot's penchant for both mysticism and skepticism informs the slippages in tone, at once visionary and moribund, in "The Hollow Men."acceptedVersio

David Jones’s ‘Barbaric-fetish’ : Frazer and the ‘Aesthetic Value’ of the Liturgy

Author's accepted version (post-print).This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in Modernist Cultures. The Version of Record is available online at: http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/mod.2017.0186.Much recent critical interest in the relationship between modernism and religion has concerned itself with the occult, spiritualism, and theosophy as opposed to institutional religion, relying on an implicit analogy between the experimental in religion and the experimental in art. I argue that considering Christianity to be antithetical to modernism not only obscures an important facet of modernist religious culture, but also misrepresents the at-once tentative and imaginative thinking that marks the modernist response to religion. I explore the ways in which the poet-painter David Jones combined sources familiar from cultural modernism – namely Frazer's The Golden Bough – with Catholic thinking on the Eucharist to constitute a modernism that is both hopeful about the possibilities for aesthetic form and cautious about the unavoidable limitations of human creativity. I present Jones's openness to the creative potential of the Mass as his equivalent to the more recognisably modernist explorations of non-Western and ancient ritual: Eliot's Sanskrit poetry, Picasso's African masks, and Stravinsky's shamanic rites and suggest that his understanding of the church as overflowing with creative possibilities serves as a counterweight to the empty churches of Pericles Lewis’ seminal work, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel.acceptedVersio

‘Fools To The World’: Transatlantic Connections in the Twentieth-Century Arts and Crafts and Retreat Movements

The paper connects the poet and artist David Jones and the Roman Catholic artisanal community at Ditchling, Sussex, and Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker organisation in and around New York. Day learned about Ditchling through volumes published by the British Roman Catholic publisher Sheed & Ward, which had responded to the emergence of an American Roman Catholic college-educated population in the 1930s and 1940s by setting up a New York office. Maisie Ward (of the publisher) would also introduce Day to the practice of retreat, which decisively shaped the activities of the Catholic Worker. Drawing on archival work in the personal papers of Jones and Day, the paper uses these historical exchanges to reflect upon the emergence of a transatlantic twentieth-century retreat movement that incorporated Ignatian models, personalist philosophy, and artisanal values. ‘Fools to the World’ attends to how, for Jones and Day, retreat exemplified the artistic and spiritual importance of non-utilitarian, gratuitous activity. From this, retreat emerges as both a constituent part of a broader critique of modernity and a distinctive and creative form of lay religious practice

Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy

'Modernism and Religion' argues that modernism participated in broader processes of religious change in the twentieth century. The new prominence accorded to immanence and immediacy in religious discourse is carried over into the modernist epiphany. Modernism became mystical. The emergence of Catholic theological modernism, human rights, Christian sociology, and philosophical personalism, which are explored here in relation to the work of David Jones, T. S. Eliot, and H.D., represented a strategic attempt on the part of diverse religious authorities to meet the challenge posed by new mysticism. Orthodoxy was itself made new in ways that resisted the secular demand that religion remain a private undertaking. Modernism and Religion presents the mechanical form and clashing registers of long poems by each of the aforementioned writers as an alternative to epiphanic modernism. Their wavering orthodoxy brings matters from which the secular had previously separated religion back once more into its purview

Rule of Silence: Religion and the Modernist City

This is lesson plan for a seminar that forms part of a course on modernism. It draws on Jamie Callison's monograph 'Modernism and Religion' and T. S. Eliot's 'Little Gidding'. It uses the rise of silent retreats as a form of religious practice to explore the challenges of the modernist city and the way in which these challenges contributed to religious change

Religious Change in the Age of Modernism

This is a lesson plan for a seminar that forms part of a modernism course. It draws on Jamie Callison's monograph 'Modernism and Religion', T. S. Eliot's essay 'Religion and Literature' and David Jones's poem 'In Parenthesis'. It explores changing notions of religious poetry as a way of understanding broader processes of religious change in the twentieth century

Sacred Ground: Orthodoxy, Poetry and Religious Change

This chapter uses the example of the twentieth-century retreat movement to challenge several assumptions about the relationship between secularisation and literary modernism. It shows how institutional religions – in this case of the Church of England – responded to processes of religious change at work through the first half of the twentieth century. The silent retreats developed by the Anglo-Catholic Association for Promoting Retreats (APR) represent an attempt on the part of institutional religion to draw on (and to draw in) the contemporary interest in mysticism and spirituality and to provide it with a religious home within the church. The development of a new religious practice, namely the rise of mass participation in lay retreat, is considered alongside developments in twentieth-century religious poetry as represented by T. S. Eliot’s 'Four Quartets'. The chapter argues that transformations in religious orthodoxy are as an important a development in the emerging relationship between modernism and religion as the rise of new religions and the well-documented prominence of no religion

Jesuits and Modernism? Catholic Responses to Anti-Modernism and Versions of Late Modernism

Recent critical discussion has suggested that cultural modernism took its impetus from a rallying cry against the Vatican’s condemnation of theological modernism in 1907. As a counterpoint to this position, I trace the intra-Catholic counter-reaction to the bull—a reaction that continued to explore issues important to modernity while steering clear of sensitive topics—that had lasting influence on the work of T. S. Eliot and David Jones. This historical excavation opens up an underappreciated area of thought that complements recent approaches to the study of modernism and religio

Secular Critique or Critique of the Secular: H.D., David Jones & the Public Voice of Religion

This lesson plan for a literature and religion class draws on Jamie Callison's monograph 'Modernism and Religion', H.D.'s poem 'Helen in Egypt' and David Jones's poem 'The Grail Mass' to explore key features of a secular outlook and the challenge modernist poetry posed for it.