Invoking the Sacred in a Secular Age: Modernist Appeals to the Divine in T. S. Eliot and İsmet Özel
RELIGIONS, vol.16, no.11, 2025 (AHCI, Scopus)
- Publication Type: Article / Article
- Volume: 16 Issue: 11
- Publication Date: 2025
- Doi Number: 10.3390/rel16111402
- Journal Name: RELIGIONS
- Journal Indexes: Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), Scopus, ATLA Religion Database, Index Islamicus, Linguistic Bibliography, Directory of Open Access Journals
- Open Archive Collection: AVESIS Open Access Collection
- Bursa Uludag University Affiliated: Yes
Abstract
This article offers a comparative study of T. S. Eliot's Ash-Wednesday and & Idot;smet & Ouml;zel's "Ament & uuml;" to examine how modernist poetry refunctions ritual language as an aesthetic and spiritual response to different modernities. Drawing on world-systems theory and the sociology of secularization, the study argues that Eliot and & Ouml;zel exemplify two structurally distinct but related modern experiences: Eliot writes from within the West's internal fragmentation, while & Ouml;zel speaks from the periphery of an imposed, Westernizing modernity. These divergent contexts produce contrasting religious modernisms-Eliot's introspective Anglo-Catholic poetics of inward renewal versus & Ouml;zel's populist Islamic poetics of collective dissent. Both poets employ modernist form-fragment, refrain, montage-to reassert the sacred within secular conditions, yet with opposing cultural motivations. The comparison demonstrates that religious modernism is a transnational phenomenon, not a Western anomaly, and that literary modernism itself adapts to the asymmetries of global modernity. The article concludes by proposing "religious modernist poetics" as a comparative framework for studying faith and form across literary traditions.