Deus otiosus describes a creator god who is absent, indifferent, or retired from the world he made. In poetry, it appears in theodicy verse, modernist religious poems, and works that explore divine silence in the face of human suffering. The concept is central to deist philosophy and to the post-Enlightenment crisis of faith. Poets invoke it when confronting the apparent indifference of the cosmos, the silence of God, and the loneliness of a creation abandoned by its creator.

Deus otiosus (idle or lazy god) is a concept from the comparative history of religion, describing a pattern found in many world religions where the creator god withdraws after creation and is replaced in practical religious life by more accessible lesser deities or spirits. The concept was developed by the historian of religion Mircea Eliade in his work on the morphology of religious experience. Students should note that deus otiosus is distinct from the deist God who winds up the clockwork universe and lets it run: the deist God is absent by design, while the deus otiosus has simply lost interest or become inaccessible. In poetry, the deus otiosus creates the particular atmosphere of what has been called the post-Christian condition: a world that still bears the marks of having been created and once cared for, but from which the caring presence has withdrawn.