Invoking the Sacred in a Secular Age: Modernist Appeals to the Divine in T. S. Eliot and İsmet Özel

This article offers a comparative study of T. S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday and İsmet Özel’s “Amentü” 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 Özel exemplify two structurally distinct but related modern experiences: Eliot writes from within the West’s internal fragmentation, while Özel 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 Özel’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.