'Our Modern Hope': An Analysis of Unorthodox Religion in the Writings of W. B. Yeats and Juan Ramón Jiménez

Abstract

The theological modernist movement articulated many of the issues that literary modernism went on to develop, particularly in relation to religion and the individual s place within it. Theological modernism had a profound impact on the cultural and literary milieu of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in Europe. However, this issue has largely remained unexplored. This thesis is a comparative examination of the religious writings of Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958) and W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) in the light of theological modernism and alternative conceptions of religion. The comparison demonstrates shared concerns across space, time and language. It examines the reconfiguration of religious thought as a response to modernity in both of the poets literary outputs from a supra-national point of view. The thesis traces the development of their religious approaches to the text. These approaches grow increasingly unorthodox, from the use of mysticism in their earlier collections, to symbolism, to final unorthodox explorations of death. Their unorthodoxy is imbricated into their sense of self. In falling outside pre-established religious frameworks, both poets use the text to reimagine their place within the new religious context of modernity