Theologies of Crisis in British Literature of the Interwar Period

My dissertation shows how the work of a range of interwar British poets---T. S. Eliot, David Jones, and W. H. Auden---grew out of a serious and sustained reading of then-contemporary Christian theology. In the 1930s and 1940s, poets read theologians (and oftentimes wrote about them in literary reviews), and theologians read poets (and reflected upon them in their own work). For these poets, religious belief involved not just emotional but intellectual assent, and contemporary theologians like Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr provided an example of how human language and reason could engage meaningfully with divine truth. The story of this interdisciplinary conversation has not been told before, and it changes how we read both the literature and the broader intellectual history of the period.;My first chapter, "The 'Living Theology' of the Criterion," examines the presence of theological discourse within interwar literary periodicals. In the Criterion, the TLS, and other interwar magazines, Karl Barth's theology was discussed side-by-side with Auden's poetry and Catholic sacramentalism was marshaled as a coherent defense of modernist aesthetics. As I argue, to be a reader of modernist magazines was to be familiar with contemporary theological debates. Chapter 2, '"The Twice-Broken World': T. S. Eliot, Karl Barth, and the Poetics of Christian Revelation," moves from Eliot's editing practices to his poetry, comparing Eliot, arguably the twentieth century's most influential poet, to Barth, arguably the century's most influential theologian. Barth's dialectical theology focused on the abyssal gap separating God from man, and I argue that Eliot's Four Quartets does the same. For Eliot as for Barth, grace obliterates rather than perfects nature, and we are left less with a world charged with the grandeur of God than with a world mourning God's absence.;Chapter 3, "Sacramental Theology and David Jones's Poetics of Torsion," argues that Jones's The Anathemata puts into poetic form the theological thought of the French Jesuit Maurice de la Taille. More specifically, I look at what I call Jones's poetics of torsion, his regular wrenching of words into new functions: the noun "tabernacle" becomes the participle "tabernacled," for instance, and a ship is described as "cogginged, tenoned, spiked." This stylistic tic, I argue, created a distinctively sacramental poetics, moving away from predication and description---x was like y---and towards enactment and action---x y'ed. Finally, in chapter 4, "Auden's Meanwhile," I read Auden's poetry of the 1940s through the lens of Reinhold Niebuhr's theology of history. Where the young Auden saw history as apocalypse, the late Auden, channeling Niebuhr, sees history as the meanwhile; he examines not the imminent end-of-days but the frustrating gap separating the City of Man from the City of God. While Eliot and Jones examine theology's vertical tension---the relation between immanence and transcendence---Auden's For the Time Being, "Memorial for the City," and other explicitly Christian poems explore theology's horizontal tension---the relation between the fallen now and the perfected future.