[If] T. S. Eliot is the most important religious poet in English in the first half of the twentieth century, Everson // Antoninus is the most important religious poet of the second half of the century.

The extreme contrasts between those two poets point to a symptomatic tension in the religious commitment. The differences are less doctrinal than temperamental: Eliot the conservative classicist submitting the weaknesses of the individual to the reasonable authority of tradition and institutional structures in order to absolve him from the exigencies of personality; and Everson, the romantic individualist, trusting reason less than the undertow of passion and instinct to write out a life-long poem, as Whitman did a century ago, of the struggles with himself to realize himself. (p. 355)

[The] explicitly Christian poets of the twentieth century have, by and large, tended to stress the constraining limits of a radically flawed creation through which...