I have been stopping with an ex-pupil, now a master at my old school, Malvern:⁷⁶ a pleasant little town, about sixty miles from here, lying under the foot of a four miles range of hills, two thousand feet high, in the Severn valley. Of course this is nothing much in the way of height, but they rise so abruptly from the level that one gets the effect of miniature mountains; and there is splendid air and exercise to be had in tramping them. To add to the joy, our curious climate has suddenly decided to give us an advance instalment of summer—at least one hopes it is only an instalment and not the summer. It was 75 degrees yesterday, and as hot today; all the women in summer frocks and so forth. Malvern town is a perfect and melancholy example of the change which has come over this country since my schooldays; then, it was a town of large ugly, comfortable Victorian houses, designed to be run by four or five servants apiece. The same houses are still there, but at least seven out of every ten are now either schools, offices, or boarding houses.

I occasionally glance at the news of your Presidential elections with that respectful bewilderment with which one regards another nation’s domestic affairs. To us, the question naturally presents itself from the viewpoint of which candidate will be most sympathetic to our troubles. Most people here seem to hope for Eisenhower, and are most afraid of Taft: who, rightly or wrongly, seems to have the reputation of being the old style Isolationist.⁷⁷ It is being said that if he is returned, his foreign policy will be that America should be defended in America, and not in Europe. But I suspect that this must be a crude exaggeration.

I hope Mrs. Allen keeps well: please remember me very kindly to her. Do you both propose to go to the seaside this year? If all goes well, I shall be in Eire for a fortnight in August, with daily bathing: not the best sort of bathing, but a sight better than none at all. For, being on a bay, there are practically no waves; and where the sea is perpetually calm, I would just as soon, indeed sooner, bathe in a river.

With all best wishes and many thanks to you both, from us both,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO DELMAR BANNER (W):⁷⁸ TS

REF.52/196

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

29th April 1952.

My dear Banner,

Thanks for yours of yesterday. But in the words of the immortal Jeeves to Bertie Wooster, ‘I fear, Sir, I am unable to recede from my position.’⁷⁹

Yes indeed, I hope to visit your country before I die;⁸⁰ but I have many calls upon my time, and my own Ireland generally lures me to it when I can take a holiday.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

The knowledge that I could (liceret mihi)⁸¹ advise is no use because I know I couldn’t (non possem).⁸²

With the growing fame of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis was invited to address the Library Association during their Bournemouth conference, held between 29 April and 2 May. On 29 April he read a paper entitled ‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’.⁸³

TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

May 1/52

I think the Bournemouth Lecture was a success. One librarian said I had almost converted him to fairy-tales, he having hitherto taken the ‘real life’ stuff for granted.

Two librariennes said The Luck of the Lynns was in much demand and one praised The Wonderful Stranger.⁸⁴ I added that some of your unpublished & more ‘faerian’ books were even better. You were spoken of with much respect.

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

May 5th 1952

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Thank you for your cheery letter and the delightful enclosures. I’ve seldom seen better photos of children. And the landscape lures one into it. I long to be tramping over those wooded—or, what is better, half wooded hills. I’m as sensitive as a German to the spell of das Feme⁸⁵ and all that.

About the high-low quarrels in the Church, whatever the merits of the dispute are, the ‘heat’ is simply and solely Sin, and I think parsons ought to preach on it from that angle.

By the way, the ‘conversation-piece’ by Paul & Mini is really excellent. I hope you will all go on having a lovely time. God bless you all.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W): TS

REF.52/205.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

6th May 1952.

Dear Mrs. Berners-Price,

Many thanks for your letter of the 4th. This is most kind of you, and I will very gladly accept your hospitality for the night of Wednesday 7th, tomorrow;⁸⁶ I should like to stop over Thursday too, but I fear that will be impossible. Indeed nothing but the Majesty of the Law would have got me out of Oxford for one night at the present moment. I come by a train which reaches Ramsgate at 6.8 p.m.

Yours gratefully,

C. S. Lewis

(modern blotting paper!)⁸⁷

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT:⁸⁸

Sir,–

The authorship of The Sheepheards Slumber (No. 133 in Englands Helicon, beginning ‘In Pescod time, when Hound to Home’) is not stated in any edition that I have been able to consult. The poem will be found in A pleasaunte Laborinth called Churchyardes Chance etc. London. Ihon Kyngston 1580. It is there entitled A matter of fonde Cupid, and vain Venus.

C. S. Lewis

TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

May 9th 1952

Dear Mrs Berners Price

Thanks to you and your husband the trial now looms so small in the total adventure that I feel more like a man back from a holiday than a witness released from the box: not that it was a box, neither, being more like a nursery fender.

The actual scene in court was horrid. I never saw Justice at work before, and it is not a pretty sight. Any creature, even an animal, at bay, surrounded by its enemies, is a dreadful thing to see: one felt one was committing a sort of indecency by being present. What did impress me was the absence of any resentment or vindictiveness on the part of the witnesses: you two victims especially were, I thought, getting v. high marks. But, as I say, what I really remember most is a delightful visit to very nice people in a charming house. I am sorry I left my kind host without even a hand-shake: but my doom was upon me.

May I now book a room at Courtstairs (in the ordinary way) for the night of May 18th? I think Walsh said he wd. drive us to Canterbury on the morning of the 19th. I expect I can get on from Canterbury on the afternoon of the 19th.

I enclose ‘PC’⁸⁹ for Penelope.⁹⁰ And once again many, many thanks. I don’t really know why you should have been so kind to a stranger, whose very name must have rather sinister associations in both your minds by now!

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY (L):

[Magdalen College]

13/5/52

Dear ‘Mrs Lockley’

In Bp. Gore’s ‘Sermon on the mount’…I find the view that Christ forbade ‘divorce in such a sense as allowed re-marriage’.⁹¹ The question is whether He made an exception by allowing divorce in such a sense as allowed re-marriage when the divorce was for adultery. In the Eastern Church re-marriage of the innocent party is allowed: not in the Roman. The Anglican Bps. at Lambeth in 1888 denied re-marriage to the guilty party, and added that ‘there has always been a difference of opinion in the Ch. as to whether Our Lord meant to forbid re-marriage of the innocent party in a divorce’.⁹²

It wd. seem then that the only question is whether you can divorce your husband in such a sense as wd. make you free to re-marry. I imagine that nothing is further from your thoughts. I believe that you are free as a Christian woman to divorce him especially since the refusal to do so does harm to the innocent children of his mistress: but that you must (or should) regard yourself as no more free to marry another man than if you had not divorced him. But remember I’m no authority on such matters, and I hope you will ask the advice of one or two sensible clergymen of our own Church.

Our own Vicar whom I have just rung up, says that there are Anglican theologians who say that you must not divorce him. His own view was that in doubtful cases the Law of Charity shd. always be the over-riding consideration, and in a case such as yours charity directs you to divorce him…

TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

May 14th 1952

Dear Mrs. Berners-Price

Those plaguey police (they seem to live on my telephone at present: it might be less trouble to be the prisoner than to be a witness!) have just rung to say that the trial will probably not be on May 19th after all and I’m to wait till I get a notice. So may I cancel my room at Courtstairs for the 18th? You’ll let me know if I’ve involved you in any loss, won’t you? And I shall probably be wiring for a room some other night when I’ve got the notice. Heigh-ho!

All the best to both of you, and Penelope. I wish the dog cd. be put in the witness box.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO WAYLAND HILTON YOUNG (W): TS

REF.52/219.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

15th May 1952.

Dear Hilton-Young,

I’ve no car and no wireless. You might try Professor G. Driver (this College) for a reading list on the Judith period.⁹³ But do take care: a story already very well told in an ancient text, is a bad thing to work on. The only hope is that the Babylonian stuff might start interesting you for its own sake, and lead to a quite new story in that setting. Otherwise…is there a single success in re-telling an ancient story with modern novelistic technique? It is stark ruin.

Thanks very much for the kind suggestion, but no can do. I am tangled up (only as witness) in a trial, and can make no plans. All good wishes,

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO GENIA GOELZ (L/P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

15 May 1952

Dear Genia

Thanks for your letter of the 9th. All our prayers are being answered and I thank God for it. The only (possibly, not necessarily) unfavourable symptom is that you are just a trifle too excited.⁹⁴ It is quite right that you should feel that ‘something terrific’ has happened to you (it has) and be ‘all glowy’. Accept these sensations with thankfulness as birthday cards from God, but remember that they are only greetings, not the real gift. I mean, it is not the sensations that are the real thing. The real thing is the gift of the Holy Spirit which can’t usually be—perhaps not ever—experienced as a sensation or emotion. The sensations are merely the response of your nervous system. Don’t depend on them. Otherwise when they go and you are once more emotionally flat (as you certainly will be quite soon), you might think that the real thing had gone too. But it won’t. It will be there when you can’t feel it. May even be most operative when you can feel it least.

Don’t imagine it is all ‘going to be an exciting adventure from now on’. It won’t. Excitement, of whatever sort, never lasts. This is the push to start you off on your first bicycle: you’ll be left to [do] lots of dogged pedalling later on. And no need to be depressed about it either. It will be good for your spiritual leg muscles. So enjoy the push while it lasts, but enjoy it as a treat, not as something normal.

Of course, none of us have ‘any right’ at the altar. You might as well talk of a non-existent person ‘having a right’ to be created. It is not our right but God’s free bounty. An English peer said, ‘I like the order of the Garter because it has no dam’ nonsense about merit!⁹⁵ Nor has Grace. And we must keep on remembering that as a cure for Pride.

Yes, pride is a perpetual nagging temptation. Keep on knocking it on the head but don’t be too worried about it. As long as one knows one is proud one is safe from the worst form of pride.

If Hoyle⁹⁶ answers your letter, then let the correspondence drop. He is not a great philosopher (and none of my scientific colleagues think much of him as a scientist), but he is strong enough to do some harm. You’re not David and no one has told you to fight Goliath! You’ve only just enlisted. Don’t go off challenging enemy champions. Learn your drill. I hope this doesn’t sound all like cold water! I can’t tell you how pleased I was with your letter.

God bless you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

16th May 1952.

Thank you both very much. It will give me great pleasure to dine with you at 7.30 on May 29th. I shall presume ordinary clothes, unless I hear from you to the contrary.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

In May 1952 John H. McCallum of Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, invited Lewis to contribute an article on Edmund Spenser to Volume I of Major British Writers, under the general editorship of G. B. Harrison. Lewis accepted, and his extant correspondence with Harcourt, Brace & World begins with the following letter:

TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

May 21st 1952

Dear Mr. McCallum,

Thank you for yours of the 16th. I think I shall be able to keep all your ‘suggested rules’ except the first. The proportion 15, 45, 20 for Life, General Essay, Particular Analysis wd. not really be suitable for Spenser. The materials for his life do not really add up to a ‘character’: I don’t mean that I couldn’t write one, but if I did I should be contributing to historical fiction. Nor is his kind of poetry one which would yield much under detailed analysis of short passages. The chief thing we must do, indeed, is to encourage readers to remember that he is a romancier, à long haleine.⁹⁷ I cd. accept your suggested proportions alright if I were doing Milton: but they’d ruin an Introduction to Spenser.

My selections will be all from Faerie Queene and Epíthalamíon:⁹⁸ there’s no room for anything else. The bits from EQ. will be often arranged so as to yield something like continuous narrative: as soon as I looked into the matter I saw that a mere conglomeration of the best single stanzas wd. give no idea of his quality and wd., indeed, be almost unreadable. I hope this meets with your approval.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO JOAN PILE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

May 21st 1952

Dear Mrs. Pile

What a horrible business! Of course neither I nor anyone who knows you could believe the allegations for a moment. I don’t think I cd. do much good by writing to Ld. Nuffield, though I am prepared to try it if nothing better can be done. Have you tried your M.P. I mean, not about the expenses of the case but about the injustice of being forced to answer questions on oath and then accused of slander for answering them? In the meantime I am writing to a legal friend of my own for advice. I can’t tell you how sorry I am for you in this trouble. I will write again as soon as I have anything to report.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

Magdalen etc.

May 23rd 1952

Dear Vera Gebbert

Well, well, what next? Very hearty congratulations.⁹⁹ Everything in the photos is lovely except the goggles: and they, I suppose, are a Necessary Evil, like civilisation, government, medicine, education, law, and nearly everything else. You’ll have to watch those very depraved antelopes. If they are already addicted to gum and tobacco, they will soon develop a taste for cocktails. (Our college herd of deer used to be v. fond of bread soaked in port–in the days when wine was cheaper. They don’t get the chance now). I shall think, in all the extenuating circumstances, you might be excused for ‘neglecting your writing’. I don’t know that I’d really like to marry a girl who wrote fiction all the time on the honeymoon. (Of course if 7 did, that wd. be quite different and it wd. be most unreasonable of her to object.)

Nor can I quite believe that an avid expectation of my next book makes a very large part of your present experience. Anyway, it won’t be fulfilled. I’m busy at present finishing the heavy, academic work on 16th. Century literature wh. has occupied me (it has been the top tune—all the other books were only its little twiddly bits) for the last 15 years. When it is actually done I expect my whole moral character will collapse. I shall go up like a balloon that has chucked out the last sandbag.

My brother is away for a few days but wd. certainly join in all my felicitations if he were here. I hope you will both live happily ever afterwards and tell stories to your great-grandchildren, travelling in donkey carriages along the mountain roads with hair as white as the snows. God bless you both.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):¹⁰⁰

[Magdalen College]

28/5/52

My dear Dom Bede–

It isn’t chiefly men I am kept in touch with by my huge mail: it is women. The female, happy or unhappy, agreeing or disagreeing, is by nature a much more epistolary animal than the male.

Yes, Pascal does directly contradict several passages in Scripture and must be wrong. What I ought to have said was that the Cosmological argument is, for some people at some times, ineffective. It always has been for me. (By the way do read K. Z. Lorenz King Solomons Ring on animal—especially bird—behaviour.¹⁰¹ There are instincts I had never dreamed of: big with a promise of real morality. The wolf is a v. different creature from what we imagine.)

The stories you tell about two perverts belong to a terribly familiar pattern: the man of good will, saddled with an abnormal desire wh. he never chose, fighting hard and time after time defeated. But I question whether in such a life the successful operation of Grace is so tiny as we think. Is not this continued avoidance either of presumption or despair, this ever renewed struggle, itself a great triumph of Grace? Perhaps more so than (to human eyes) equable virtue of some who are psychologically sound.

I am glad you think J. Austen a sound moralist. I agree. And not platitudinous, but subtle as well as firm.

I’ll write to Skinner. Merlin was excellent. I haven’t written yet because someone has had my copy, till a day or two ago, almost ever since my first reading.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

P. S. Is the Elgin address going to be permanent?

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD): TS

[June? 1952]¹⁰²

Thank you for a letter which I prize very much. The sonnets, though in a manner which will win few hearers at the moment (drat all fashions) are really very remarkable.¹⁰³ The test is that I found myself at once forgetting all the personal biographical interest and reading them as poetry.

The image of sand is real imagination. I thought this was the better of the two at first: but now I don’t know. The second quatrain of The Gap is tip-top argument—and then the ground sinking behind.¹⁰⁴ Excellent.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO KATHARINE FARRER(BOD):¹⁰⁵

As from Magdalen

June 10th 1952

Dear Mrs. Farrer–

I brought home both The Missing Link¹⁰⁶ and Merlin¹⁰⁷ yesterday evening, intending to regale myself on light fiction for a bit before tackling poetry. But—well, you foresee what I am leading up to with elephantine delicacy. It happens, however, to be true. I never reached Merlin and sat up later than I intended to finish the M.L.

I thought it very well constructed, and it thoroughly excited me. That, of course, is not of much value because I’m such an inexperienced reader of Whodunnits. But there were a great many sources of pleasure besides the mystery. You do the atmosphere of the Wychwood country and of Liverpool docks (both of which I know) very well—though, by the way, on p. 141 ‘the familiar devil of the stairs’ completely defeated me. Is the text corrupt?¹⁰⁸ The description of Syd on pp. 24-25 is an excellent bit of writing. The Spanish captain is good. And, of course, there’s wit everywhere, and often with weight of thought behind the sting–‘Notice how he uses down (p. 50), and the bit about families ><¹⁰⁹ family allowances and houses >< housing bit on p. 127. Richard’s (delightfully preluded) remarks at the bottom of p. 104 and the top of 105 needed making. (Mrs. Luke, by the way, convinces me completely).

About your dialogue I’m not so happy. Mrs. Harman talks well. But if I were a spiteful reviewer I’d say that the advice ‘Don’t talk like a C.W. character’¹¹⁰ ought to have been given to Richard (and obeyed!) earlier. Not that C.W. isn’t a v. great man but one must not imitate the droop of Alexander’s shoulders. Richard is talking like a C.W. character at his worst on the top of p. 85. He (Richard, not C.W.) would have better manners than to quote poetry to Plummer who wd. certainly think he was being somehow made a fool of and be hurt.

I think dialogue is frightfully tricky: partly because it is so hard to stop writing it (characters will talk: at least so I find) and partly because so much that wd. be alright in real conversation looks different when it gets into print. Andrew’s clipped G’s for instance. It’s a v. small thing in real life: but ‘in” in print usually suggests huntin at once and all the odious literature written by people who admire those who say huntin and the yet more odious literature by those who dislike them. I dare say we’d be wise to re-read all our dialogue as it might be read by a dull, or vulgar, or hostile reader. And of course it’s the light dialogue (banter between lovers, small talk at a party) that is dangerous. But I don’t know what right I have to talk like this, especially without being asked!

It was a good idea to make the Links so silly that their trouble never really affects us. (Oh—by the way–does any ship carry her own gangways and pull them on board when she casts off? In my experience they always belong to the harbour and are pulled onto the quay.) Indeed you have done the Links so well that one wonders if it is a happy ending or whether the baby wouldn’t have had a better time being brought up by Pyng Pong ♀.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the book ‘yet had I rather if I were to choose Thy service in some graver subject use’¹¹¹–I’d like to see your remarkable powers of rendering atmosphere and swift action given their head in a good whacking heroical romance. But no doubt, in the present state of the publishing market, it wd. be crazy to advise you to do so.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

P.S. I’ve an uneasy feeling this is the sort of letter Dr. Field might have written—wh. raises another really dreadful idea.

TO MARG-RIETTE MONTGOMERY (W): ¹¹²

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 10th 1952

Dear Miss Montgomery,

(1.) My relations to Anthroposophy¹¹³ were these. When I was a student, all my friends and I were ordinary modern Atheists. Then two of my friends got caught up by Steiner.¹¹⁴ I loathed this and it led to frightful arguments for several years. During these arguments I heard nothing that would convert me to Anthroposophy: but the negative side of Steiner, his case against the common modern pseudo-scientific attitude, proved to be unanswerable. That is, I didn’t think what he affirmed was true, but I did think all his denials were right.

His shattering of the ordinary attitude left the way open for Christianity, so far as I was concerned. Since then I have always had a kindly feeling towards his system: and certainly the effect of it upon some anthroposophists I know appears to have been good. There is, however, an element of polytheism in it which I utterly reject. Steinerism is a species of Paganism (using that word in its proper sense, to mean the ancient pre-Christian religions). That is why it is (a.) Incompatible with Christianity: but (b.) Far nearer to Christianity than the ordinary modern materialism. For the Pagans knew more than the modern Ph.D’s. The right thing to say to your Ph.D. friends is ‘Yes. Steiner is nonsense: but nothing like such nonsense as the things you believe.’ There is more truth in his nonsense than in their sense. We are free to take out of Anthroposophy anything that suits us, provided it does not contradict the Nicene Creed.

(2.) Oh, I just ‘made up’ all those things in That Hideous Strength: i.e. I took existing evil tendencies and ‘produced’ them (in the geometrical sense–‘Produce the line AB to the point X’) to show how dreadful they might become if we didn’t take care. And you, apparently, have been living in a world where they had already in real life got a good deal nearer to my point X than I knew. Well, that is the trouble about satirising the modern world. What you put into your story as fantastically horrid possibilities becomes fact before your story is printed. The reality outstrips the satire!

With all good wishes. You can trust Steiner about fertilisers but not about the nature of Jesus Christ. (I think his architecture horrid, but that’s a matter of taste)

Yours very sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

10/6/52

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

The new photos raise extreme Sehnsucht:¹¹⁵ each a landscape as fulfils my dreams. That is the America I wd. like to see, not the great cities, which, except superficially, are really much the same all over the earth.

I think psychiatry is like surgery: i.e. the thing is in itself essentially an infliction of wounds but may, in good hands, be necessary to avoid some greater evil. But it is more tricky than surgery because the personal philosophy & character of the operator come more into play. In setting a broken ankle all surgeons wd. agree as to the proper position to wh. the bones shd. be restored, because anatomy is an exact science. But all psychiatrists are not agreed as to the proper shape of the soul: where their ideas of that proper shape are based on a heathen or materialistic philosophy, they may be aiming at a shape we shd. strongly disapprove. One wants a Christian psychiatrist. There are a few of these, but nothing like enough.

If I can successfully say to Genia what you have often said in vain, that is not because of any quality in me but depends on a general (and at first sight cruel) law: we can all ‘take’ from a stranger what we can’t ‘take’ from our own parents. I listen with profit to elderly friends saying the very same things which I neglected or even resented when my father said them. Nay more: I can obey advice from others wh. I have often given myself in vain. I suppose this is one aspect of the vicariousness of the universe: Charles Williams’s view that every one can help to paddle every one else’s canoe better than his own. We must bear one another’s burdens because that is the only way the burdens can get borne: and ‘He saved others, himself He cannot save’¹¹⁶ is a fundamental law.¹¹⁷

Yes: ‘things’ continue almost alarmingly ‘better’ with me. God bless you all

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM BORST (P):¹¹⁸

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 11th 1952

Dear Mr. Borst–

It takes so long to get anything typed now-a-days that I thought you wd. prefer the lesser nuisance of reading the specimen (asked for in your letter of June 4th) in my own hand. I think it raises all the problems wh. are likely to occur in Spenser–who will not need such heavy glossing as Shakespeare. The only one I was doubtful about was remembrance = memento in line ll.¹¹⁹ Wd. they need that explained? (We don’t want to spoon-feed them more than is necessary.)

I am terrified by all the instructions about typing and doubt if I can master them. (You showed great discretion in not producing them at an earlier stage, as I shd. certainly not have touched the job had I known it involved all that!). I suppose # means ‘one-space’ and is not a challenge to a game of noughts and crosses. And what is meant by the typist ‘using’ the double right hand margin? In the specimen given she does precisely not use it but types straight on across it to the ultimate right hand margin. Do you mean ‘Let her draw a vertical line 8 spaces to the left of her actual right hand margin and then ignore this line in typing?’ As you begin to see, I have picked up none of the technique of a professional author. Sorry.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

P.S. You might let me have the specimen back.

TO HSIN’CHANG CHANG (BOD):¹²⁰ TS

REF.52/252.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

12th June 1952.

Dear Mr. Chang,

If you would care to call on me here at 12 o’c. on Friday 20th, it would give me great pleasure.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO ROBERT LONGACRE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

June 19th 1952

Dear Mr. Longacre–

All opinions on new poetry are uncertain: especially on poetry read because one has been asked to read it and with the knowledge (which freezes up all the faculties) that one must express a view on it to the author.

You must therefore not attach too much importance to my ‘re-action’. The truth is, these poems don’t work—with me: they might with other readers, and, I dare say, better readers than I. The poetic species to which they belong—which might be called the Rhapsodical—is one to which I am very insensitive: I can’t bear Walt Whitman.

My feeling is that the more vast and supersensible a poem’s subject is, the more it needs to be fixed, founded, incarnated in regular metre and concrete images. Thus I is, for me, the worst. Ill is better: the line about the candle in God’s window, the best thing in it. But they are not my sort of poetry. You won’t take this too seriously: they might well suit some other reader. I can’t tell you how I wish I could write something more encouraging: but between Christians the truth must be spoken.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MONSIGNOR FERDINAND VANDRY (WHL): ¹²¹

Poprzedni 1 ...12 131415 16 ...30 Kolejny