His research interests include the intersection of religion and the arts, and the examination of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield, and British poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

[1] Although his family had settled in Canada, his parents thought he was losing his British identity and decided to enroll him in boarding school in England where he spent his teenage years.

He describes the boarding school experience as terrible, an "atmosphere of guilt, oppression and general alienation" where he strayed from his childhood Christian faith.

[4] In its place, Guite embraced a "rational scientific materialism" coloured by B.F. Skinner's behaviourism and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett.

In the end, however, he decided that he belonged in England after winning a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge to read English and after discovering "real ale"—something he says "they don't have properly in Canada at all".

[1] Guite returned gradually to his Christian faith, first under the influence of beauty in the poetry of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley and visits to historical sites that had deep religious significance—Rome, Glencolmcille, and Scotland's Iona.

[6] While researching the topic of his dissertation, in considering the struggles of John Donne with a similar question in the early seventeenth-century, Guite began to wonder if God was calling him too to be a priest.

[1] He put poetry aside for seven years, "in order to concentrate on and learn deeply my priestly vocation, and life in my parishes was totally absorbing and demanding so it felt right to let the other fields lie fallow".

[5] Guite also lectures regularly in the United States and Canada, including visiting positions at Duke University Divinity School and Regent College.

[13] In January 2017, Guite spoke as an interviewed guest on Radio 4's Great Lives Series, together with Suzannah Lipscomb, on how C. S. Lewis had inspired her life.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, remarked that Guite "knows exactly how to use the sonnet form to powerful effect" and that his poems "offer deep resources for prayer and meditation to the reader".

[20][21] Concerning Guite's collection Sounding the Seasons, poet and literary critic Grevel Lindop remarked: "using the sonnet form with absolute naturalness as he traces the year and its festivals, he offers the reader—whether Christian or not—profound and beautiful utterance which is patterned but also refreshingly spontaneous".