ABSTRACT
My discussion of the return of the liturgical with the advent of modernism, and maybe also with the advent of modernity, seeks to understand the resilience of Christianity in music and poetry, especially in the modern period roughly coextensive with the twentieth century. The twentieth century has been characterised as a secular age where immanence rather than transcendence can be taken for granted, so a palpable interest in sacred music originally composed for the liturgy has considerable interest. It is therefore an implicit critique of the kind of secularisation theory that treats the transition from the religious to the secular as unilinear. As I, and others, have argued, the process is not unilinear, and the religious and the secular are not so easily distinguished, the one from the other. Given the immensity of the subject I am restricting myself to western music and in poetry my references are mainly restricted to English.
