Modernist Poetics and the Secular Imagination

R&L 50.1-2 (Spring-Summer 2018) 177 Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period. Anthony Domestico Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. 184 pp. $29.95 hard cover, $29.95 eBook. Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance. Matthew Mutter Yale University Press, 2017. 336 pp. $85 hard cover. T. S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination. Sarah Kennedy Cambridge University Press, 2018. 268 pp. £75 hard back, $80 eBook. “Quis hic locus, quae region, quae mundi plaga?”1 What is this place in which I have awoken? What is this new world in which I find myself adrift? And what is this I see beyond me, an image in the fog, both forgotten and familiar? T. S. Eliot’s “Marina” (1930) is a poem about finding oneself in a changed world. It is a poem preoccupied with what happens when the conditions of experience change and our horizons draw in. And it is a poem that asks what this means for our knowledge of those things that are, in some sense, beyond us. “Marina” is, as William Empson observed in 1931, a poem about the MODERNIST POETICS AND THE SECULAR IMAGINATION A. J. Nickerson Religion & Literature 178 idea of the secular and the ways in which it shapes the modern imagination. Its “dramatic power,” he argued, lay in the “balance maintained between otherworldliness and humanism; the essence of the poem is a vision of an order, a spiritual state, which he can conceive and cannot enter.”2 The world of “Marina” is one for which there seems to be no otherworldly counterpart, no transcendent realm giving order and significance. It is a world in which all that lies beyond the self is fog and speculation. And yet while this is a secular vision of the world, it is one that registers an unease with the closed world of humanism, materialism, and—ultimately—epistemological solipsism : this is a poem about awakening to memories of that which has been lost or forgotten, to that image in the fog that might be a projection of the unconscious mind but which equally might be something truly unknown, beckoning us towards a world that exceeds or outlasts our own. It is here, in 1930, three years after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, that Eliot’s secular vision becomes self-aware and dissatisfied, the high modernism of his early writing begins to subside, and the possibility of religious belief opens up once more as a subject of literary inquiry. And it is at this point that Eliot asks what, exactly, the secular is and what it might have done to our ability to know that which transcends the sphere of private experience. Matthew Arnold saw such an awakening to that which is beyond us as the common experience of all people and the prompt for religious feeling: “The not ourselves, which is in us and in the world round us, has almost everywhere, as far as we can see, struck the minds of men, as they awoke to consciousness, and has inspired them with awe.”3 But this awakening to the metaphysical and epistemological problem of the “not ourselves” was a particular preoccupation for those modernist writers who had internalized the feeling that modernity had become inescapably secular. Arnold himself recognised that within the secular framework of modern life such an “awakening” was not so much awe-inspiring as anxiety-inducing. His work became a key reference point for subsequent modernist writers working through the implications of this experience: Literature and Dogma seems an originary text for Eliot’s “Marina” while Arnold’s terms are explicitly taken up in Wallace Stevens’ observation that “we live in a place | That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves.”4 To awake within a secular world is to find that the “not ourselves”—the world that lies beyond the self and which may, or may not, be an index of some kind of transcendent reality—is both a compelling feature of lived experience and a phenomenon that threatens to disrupt our secular accounts of what is real and knowable. It is this secular coming-to-consciousness and the ways in which it alters our imaginative encounter with the “not...