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

Description 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. Incorporating significant new material from correspondence and diaries which sheds light on Eliot’s thought, the author examines the poet’s formal adoption of Anglo-Catholicism, in 1927, as the culmination of his intellectual, cultural, artistic, spiritual and personal development to that point. Through an informed presentation and discussion of Anglo-Catholicism at the time of Eliot’s conversion and through subsequent decades, Spurr presents the first detailed analysis of the unique influence that Anglo-Catholicism’s principles and social teaching had on Eliot’s poetry, plays, prose and personal life. 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.