Abstract:    T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden are two of the greatest poetic voices of the twentieth century, both providing expression to the fears and hopes of a world torn apart by the turmoil of modernism. Both poets wrote in the shadow of the two World Wars, the breakdown of traditional moral codes, and the emergence of scientific rationality. Both responded to the unsettling breakdown of faith and meaning in modern existence. Eliot, in The Waste Land, presents the haunting vision of a spiritually barren and culturally divided civilization, but in Four Quartets he approaches the tranquility of Christian transcendence, asserting grace as the hope of redemption. Auden, on the other hand, approaches the anxious beat of modern life with a deeper immediacy: The Age of Anxiety stages the fitful quest for identity and place in a broken world, while For the Time Being discovers his own, ironic, and vulnerable struggle with Christian belief. Eliot's poetry moves toward the assurance of theological order, whereas Auden hovers over the uncertainties of lived faith and offers belief not as dogma but as a tentative and exceedingly human action. In both, but in each differently, the interaction of hope and anxiety becomes the poetic medium by which modernist writing addresses the human search for meaning.