Copyright holder: Tyndale University, 3377 Bayview Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M2M 3S4 Att.: Library Director, J. William Horsey Library Copyright: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. Copyright license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License Citation: Faught, C. Brad. Review of "Anglo-Catholic in Religion": T. S. Eliot and Christianity, by Barry Spurr. Anglican and Episcopal History 79, no. 3 (2010): 306-307. ***** Begin Content ****** TYNDALE UNIVERSITY 3377 Bayview Avenue Toronto, ON M2M 3S4 TEL:416.226.6620 www.tyndale.ca Note: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. Faught, C. Brad. Review of "Anglo-Catholic in Religion": T. S. Eliot and Christianity, by Barry Spurr. Anglican and Episcopal History 79, no. 3 (2010): 306-307. 306 ANGLICAN AND EPISCOPAL HISTORY ‘'Anglo-Catholic in Religion ”: T. S. Eliot and Christianity By Barry Spurr. (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2010, Pp. xiii, 325. $52.50, paper.) Forty-five years after his death T. S. Eliot remains as iconic a literary figure as he was during the second half of his life. Whether it be for his collection of poems, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), which has served as the inspiration for Cats, the longest-running musical in West End and Broadway history; his cardinal poem, "The Waste Land" (1922), emblematic of modernism and a staple on undergraduate read- ing lists to this day; or his private life lived among a who's who of fellow literary modernists in London, especially between the First and Second World Wars, Eliot shows no sign of falling off the edge of the cultural cliff. Like his friends and contemporaries such as Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, he has spawned a small library of studies, collections and biographies, to which the recently published second volume of his letters is the latest addition. ( The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume 2, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, London, 2009.) Given the plethora of such material one would be justified in thinking that there is not much, if anything, left to be said about the man. Barry Spurr, however, suggests otherwise, and does so convincingly in his new book on Eliot's religious faith. Spurr's previous work on modernist poetry and on Strachey leaves him in an excellent position to take up Eliot's religion, which, he argues persuasively, has never yet been handled in a comprehensive form de- spite the many life studies written of him. Eliot was an Anglo-Catholic, Spurr says unequivocally, clearly and unreservedly so from 1927 until his death almost forty years later in 1965. As a transplanted American who arrived as a student in Oxford during the first war and subsequently 307 BOOK REVIEWS resolved never to return to the United States to live, Eliot’s adoption of England as his new home brought with it a rejection of the Unitari- anism and Puritanism of his Midwestern and Massachusetts childhood and youth. In Eliot’s estimation, if one were going to be Catholic in England, the only properly attuned cultural form of it was Anglo- Catholicism. Revived by the Oxford Movement of the nineteenth cen- tury, Anglo-Catholicism was extraordinarily robust at the time Eliot came to embrace it during the late teens and 1920s, and thereafter remained loyal to its theology and aesthetic, despite his troubled first wife’s rejec- tion of both. This probing book charts in close detail Eliot’s spiritual and cultural journey in which he became his version of the faith’s best-known layman. Spurr is especially effective in recreating Eliot’s own orthopraxis and the daily acts of devotion that defined his allegiance to Anglo-Catholicism. The author is less sure in his rather light coverage of the Oxford Movement’s social impact in later-Victorian and twentieth-century England—no reference to Simon Skinner’s important Tractarians and the ''Condition of England”: the Social and Political Thought of the Oxford Movement (Oxford, 2004), on this subject, for example. But quibbles aside, this book is almost surely the definitive study of Eliot’s religion and superbly fills a lacunae in the fuller understanding of the poet’s life that has existed for far too long. C. Brad Faught Tyndale University College, Toronto ***** This is the end of the e-text. This e-text was brought to you by Tyndale University, J. William Horsey Library - Tyndale Digital Collections *****