Exploring a range of twentieth and twenty-first century Marian prayer-poetry – poem-prayers directed to or involving Mary - by poets such as T. S. Eliot, David Jones, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Jennings, Hilary Davies and Rowan Williams, this book traces its resurgence from the late nineteenth-century to the present day.

By the early twentieth century, the once widespread and fervent cult of the Virgin Mary had been at best deeply hidden, if not entirely absent from England's religious life, since the Reformation. The figure of Mary similarly largely vanished from English poetry, only to return, gradually, as Marian devotion revived in the nineteenth century. The perception of it as somehow un-English, which had developed during the centuries of its absence, presented a challenge to poets who wished to take up the Marian theme in the modern day. This book looks at some ways in which male and female poets from both Roman Catholic and Anglican backgrounds responded to this situation. It also argues that the figure of Mary is a type of John Henry Newman's category of “real assent”: commitment that is not merely intellectual, but involves the totality of a person's being in relation to God.