Matthew Arnold said it best: “Wandering between two worlds, one dead / The other powerless to be born.” Late Victorian and early twentieth-century writers were caught on this dilemma of belief or rejection of God. Some took a leap of faith over those horns of doubt; others rebelled—but seldom completely. It was in their art that some of these issues were joined and others resolved. The essays in this collection examine six authors, from Thomas Hardy to D.H. Lawrence, tracing the arc of their spiritual quests from childhood to maturity, which resulted in the artist's religious and artistic achievement—that is, the Religion of Art. The preisthood of the poet, for example, was the Aesthete's belief that high art was beyond the bourgeois's understanding.

Author or editor of fifteen books and many articles and reviews, Karl Beckson guides the reader through a remarkable literary world. Reviewing his Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia, Victorian Poetry wrote: “Beckson’s authority, established on decades of research, naturally gives the book a credibility wonderful to encounter during this time of poorly planned and atrociously printed ‘scholarship.’”