The poetry of William Blake and of John Keats is representative of the Romantic period of English poetry, just as the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and of Alfred Lord Tennyson represents the Victorian era and the poetry of William Butler Yeats represents Modern poetry. The poetry of Blake and of Keats expresses the dichotomy between the innocence of youth and the experience of life. Blake uses traditional symbols from Christian religion to express innocence and purity, and Keats uses a combination of Judeo-Christian religious imagery and Roman mythological imagery to express experience. In the Victorian era, Browning uses Blake's religious imagery to express the premature experience of children in industrialized England, and Tennyson uses Arthurian mythological imagery to express the loss of innocence. In the Modern age, Yeats uses imagery from Greek and Irish mythology and from Judeo-Christian religious beliefs to express sadness at the loss of beauty and innocence in the world. From the work of Blake and Keats to the work of Yeats, the use of religious and mythological imagery begins with images of hope and faith in the Romantic era, becomes more intellectual and conflicts with science in the Victorian period, and passes through the metaphysical to focus on the sadness of loss in the twentieth century.

T.S. Eliot was arguably the most important poet of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, there remains much scope for reconsidering the content, form and expressive nature of Eliot’s religious poetry, and this edited collection pays particular attention to the multivalent spiritual dimensions of his popular poems, such as ‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘The Waste Land’, ‘Journey of the Magi’, ‘The Hollow Men’, and ‘Choruses’ from The Rock. Eliot’s sustained popularity is an intriguing cultural phenomenon, given that the religious voice of Eliot’s poetry is frequently antagonistic towards the ‘unchurched’ or secular reader: ‘You! Hypocrite lecteur!’ This said, Eliot’s spiritual development was not a logical matter and his devotional poetry is rarely didactic. The volume presents a rich and powerful range of essays by leading and emerging T.S. Eliot and literary modernist scholars, considering the doctrinal, religious, humanist, mythic and secular aspects of Eliot’s poetry: Anglo-Catholic belief (Barry Spurr), the integration of doctrine and poetry (Tony Sharpe), the modernist mythopoeia of Four Quartets (Michael Bell), the ‘felt significance’ of religious poetry (Andy Mousley), ennui as a modern evil (Scott Freer), Eliot’s pre-conversion encounter with ‘modernist theology’ (Joanna Rzepa), Eliot’s ‘religious agrarianism’ (Jeremy Diaper), the maternal allegory of Ash Wednesday (Matthew Geary), and an autobiographical reading of religious conversion inspired by Eliot in a secular age (Lynda Kong). This book is a timely addition to the ‘return of religion’ in modernist studies in the light of renewed interest in T.S. Eliot scholarship.

The Eddic poem Vafþrúðnismál serves as a representation of early pagan beliefs or myths and as a myth itself; the poem performs both of these functions, acting as a poetic framework and functioning as sacred myth. In this study, the author looks closely at the journey of the Norse god Óðinn to the hall of the ancient and wise giant Vafþrúðnir, where Óðinn craftily engages his adversary in a life-or-death contest in knowledge.

The White Goddess is perhaps the finest of Robert Graves's works on the psychological and mythological sources of poetry. In this tapestry of poetic and religious scholarship, Graves explores the stories behind the earliest of European deities—the White Goddess of Birth, Love, and Death—who was worshipped under countless titles. He also uncovers the obscure and mysterious power of "pure poetry" and its peculiar and mythic language.