This lecture explores Eliot’s attachment to the language of liturgy, and examines the use he makes of words and rhythms from the Book of Common Prayer in three poems written around the time of his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism (The Hollow Men, A Song for Simeon and Ash-Wednesday). In the light of newly available materials from the Complete Prose and the Emily Hale Letters, the lecture looks at the intersections of poetry with prayer and blasphemy, and considers what happens when the language of liturgy meets the anxieties of modernist poetics.