Modernist fascination with the primitive was bound up with resistance to the ‘false refinements’ of institutional religion. Yet the pursuit of essences and origins was also a feature of more traditional or established European and American approaches to religion that went on to exert an unlikely influence on modernist experimentation.

The influence that the poet and painter David Jones’s thinking about the Christian sacraments exerted on his art has been well documented, but in many ways the more exciting and challenging topic is the influence his thinking about art exerted on his religious practice and understanding of the sacraments.

The rise of the psychology of religion helped transform many aspects of religious practice into a form of pathology. Strikingly, in modernist religious poetry this new diagnostic mode often sits side by side with more traditional understandings of religious phenomena.

The history of the Moravian Church in American is varied: demonstrating an initial radicalism that gave way later to a more conventional sense of respectability. The poet H.D. drew on this complicated history to remake the Moravian legacy in ways that spoke to contemporary concerns.

Retreat could be portrayed as a return: an attempt to turn away from contemporary challenges and towards monastic practices familiar from the past. Retreat nevertheless became a mass movement in the twentieth century and in the process was transformed into something altogether new.