This thesis examines the poetry of T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence in terms of its religious and aesthetic significance. I explore the common ground between these two writers, and their spiritual and philosophical differences as expressed in the content and style of their poetry, and other work. I argue that they were both driven by their dissatisfaction with the modern industrial age—the ethos that determined ‘utility’ and ‘progress’ as the means to fulfilment—which for them, however, was synonymous with the cultural and spiritual wasteland of modernity, a world without ‘god’. Eliot’s response, implicit in his poetry, was to posit a spiritual unity, a homogenous community of shared values underpinned, eventually, by Christianity—a religion that ultimately dispenses with the body, and leads us toward the Divine Father, the bodiless God. Lawrence, in contrast, keeps his reader firmly grounded in the physical world of touch—for him, the only possible world, without which there can be no spirit. We are resurrected, Lawrence believed, in the flesh—or not at all. Their respective views are evidenced throughout their poetry. We see, even in his ‘pre-Christian’ poetry, Eliot’s preoccupation with the body—his moral and aesthetic repulsion against it; and indeed I suggest that his negative depictions of the body are a prelude to his later ‘Christian’ poetry. This, I contrast with Lawrence’s glorification of the body, as manifested throughout his poetry; and I suggest that Lawrence’s ‘philosophy of life’ is morally more sound because it is grounded in nature. Although Eliot’s Christianity is not an attempt to escape the world and his responsibilities, it is nonetheless a dismissal of life in the flesh and all of its attendant joys and sorrows. It would annihilate the opposition (‘evil’, ‘darkness’, ‘lion’), and seeks release from the natural world, the tension that holds everything together, which would lead towards a cosmic imbalance, the extinction of nature, of everything—of time, into the bodiless Eternal, the resolution of body into spirit. But if there is no darkness, there is no light. This, Lawrence expresses most explicitly in his non-fiction, but his poetry is alive with it—the cosmic significance of everything, the unbegotten spark from which a god is born: the present eternal moment. The final section of my thesis is a collection of poetry (to not let go) written over the duration of three or four years. It represents my creative response to the critical component outlined above. My poems are not an imitation of Eliot and Lawrence, but evidence nonetheless of direct engagement with those two poets and the subject matter of my thesis.