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Selected Literary Essays
Selected Literary Essays includes over twenty of C. S. Lewis’s most important literary essays, written between 1932 and 1962. The topics discussed in this volume range from Chaucer to Kipling, from "The literary impact of the authorized version" to "Psycho-analysis and literary criticism," to Shakespeare and Bunyan, and Sir Walter Scott and William Morris. Common to each essay, however, are the lively wit, the distinctive forthrightness, and the discreet erudition which characterize Lewis's best critical writing.
596 pages, ebook
First published December 1, 1969
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About the author
C.S. Lewis
1,014 books47.7k followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Clive Staples Lewis was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954. He was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and been transformed into three major motion pictures.
Lewis was married to poet Joy Davidman.
W.H. Lewis was his elder brother]
Clive Staples Lewis was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954. He was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and been transformed into three major motion pictures.
Lewis was married to poet Joy Davidman.
W.H. Lewis was his elder brother]
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July 1, 2025
It probably says something significant about me that this is one of my ultimate comfort books that I take off the shelf whenever I just want to read something pleasurable and smile-inducing.
October 12, 2019
Before all else Lewis was a literary critic. Here we see him in his element. He covers the area between early English poetry (and these are his most technical essays) to the 19th century novel. Throughout we are treated to his devastating wit.
Even in his most technical essays (usually concerning how a meter in some obscure medieval poem should be read), we still get his wisdom. He notes, contrary to many “rad trad” Catholics today who paint the Reformation as a parasite upon a “happy medievalism,” that such a view never existed. “[Sir Thomas] More would not have understood the idea, sometimes found in modern writers, that he and his friends were defending a ‘Merry’ Catholic England against sour precisions” (Lewis 116).
On Jane Austen. Lewis points out that Austen writes with the same manly style as Samuel Johnson. Indeed, she has a “firmness,” using the “great abstract nouns of the classical English moralists…. ‘Good sense, courage, contentment, fortitude” (178). Lewis concludes, “Contrasted with the world of modern fiction, Jane Austen’s is at once less soft and less cruel” (179).
On Poverty of Style: Lewis notes that bad style isn’t failure to conform to a priori rules. In fact, listing what makes “good style” is often hard to state. The reader can intuit it, nonetheless. An example of bad style is when something like strong emotions are called for yet the author “is content with a vague approximation of emotion,” so that the “banality is spread all around” (269).
Bad style is insensitivity to language.
The Literary Impact of the Authourised Version
We know the King James translation had an impact of English literature. Lewis suggests that the real influence might not be where you think it is. Its style is exalted by today’s standards. It was not always so. The concepts, especially the historical form, were often embarrassing for ancient writers. Tyndale, by contrast, has a much healthier approach. He loves the Bible for “its grossness. ‘God is a Spirit,’ he writes, ‘And all his words are spiritual. His literal sense is spiritual’” (quoted in Lewis 131).
The greatest English prose writer of the age, Tyndale’s enemy, Thomas Moore, agreed with Tyndale, ironically, but came to a different conclusion: it’s not good prose (by the then current standards). Writers of high English prose in the 18 century agreed. Edward Harwood wrote a more pristine translation of the English Bible. Why would he have needed to do that if the King James style was always considered exalted?
Lewis’s argument is that the Romantic movement saw that the King James style fit neatly with key motifs that were found both in the Bible and in the Romantic imagination: shepherds, shepherd-kings, etc.
The Vision of John Bunyan
Bunyan’s chief point of greatness is his mastery “of perfect naturalness in the mimesis of ordinary conversation” (146). Of course, given that Bunyan wrote in allegories, Lewis explains to us how to read and not read allegory in Bunyan (or Spenser). If we see a green valley, “We ought not to be thinking ‘This green valley represents humility;’ we ought to be discovering , as we read, that humility is like that green valley’” (149). We move into the book from concept to image.
It’s best to read this as a guidebook rather than cover-to-cover. This text contains hard-to-find essays and gives the reader some insights to Lewis’s social vision (e.g., see his essay on William Morris’s socialism).
Even in his most technical essays (usually concerning how a meter in some obscure medieval poem should be read), we still get his wisdom. He notes, contrary to many “rad trad” Catholics today who paint the Reformation as a parasite upon a “happy medievalism,” that such a view never existed. “[Sir Thomas] More would not have understood the idea, sometimes found in modern writers, that he and his friends were defending a ‘Merry’ Catholic England against sour precisions” (Lewis 116).
On Jane Austen. Lewis points out that Austen writes with the same manly style as Samuel Johnson. Indeed, she has a “firmness,” using the “great abstract nouns of the classical English moralists…. ‘Good sense, courage, contentment, fortitude” (178). Lewis concludes, “Contrasted with the world of modern fiction, Jane Austen’s is at once less soft and less cruel” (179).
On Poverty of Style: Lewis notes that bad style isn’t failure to conform to a priori rules. In fact, listing what makes “good style” is often hard to state. The reader can intuit it, nonetheless. An example of bad style is when something like strong emotions are called for yet the author “is content with a vague approximation of emotion,” so that the “banality is spread all around” (269).
Bad style is insensitivity to language.
The Literary Impact of the Authourised Version
We know the King James translation had an impact of English literature. Lewis suggests that the real influence might not be where you think it is. Its style is exalted by today’s standards. It was not always so. The concepts, especially the historical form, were often embarrassing for ancient writers. Tyndale, by contrast, has a much healthier approach. He loves the Bible for “its grossness. ‘God is a Spirit,’ he writes, ‘And all his words are spiritual. His literal sense is spiritual’” (quoted in Lewis 131).
The greatest English prose writer of the age, Tyndale’s enemy, Thomas Moore, agreed with Tyndale, ironically, but came to a different conclusion: it’s not good prose (by the then current standards). Writers of high English prose in the 18 century agreed. Edward Harwood wrote a more pristine translation of the English Bible. Why would he have needed to do that if the King James style was always considered exalted?
Lewis’s argument is that the Romantic movement saw that the King James style fit neatly with key motifs that were found both in the Bible and in the Romantic imagination: shepherds, shepherd-kings, etc.
The Vision of John Bunyan
Bunyan’s chief point of greatness is his mastery “of perfect naturalness in the mimesis of ordinary conversation” (146). Of course, given that Bunyan wrote in allegories, Lewis explains to us how to read and not read allegory in Bunyan (or Spenser). If we see a green valley, “We ought not to be thinking ‘This green valley represents humility;’ we ought to be discovering , as we read, that humility is like that green valley’” (149). We move into the book from concept to image.
It’s best to read this as a guidebook rather than cover-to-cover. This text contains hard-to-find essays and gives the reader some insights to Lewis’s social vision (e.g., see his essay on William Morris’s socialism).
May 26, 2015
Exactly what it says. Be forewarned that this is the professional, professor side of his writing.
I didn't much like the opening lecture. And the meter ones went mostly over my head because I have never been taught to scan poetry. (sigh).
But interesting essays on writers like Bunyan, Shakespeare, Austen, William Morris. Some on language and approaches to literature. Weighing in on an essay by T. S. Eliot -- he disagrees with the relative evaluations of Shelley and Dryden.
Interesting stuff.
June 6, 2024
Lewis is an evocative prose writer and always has something new to say about a great poet.
April 28, 2018
This is one of the more "dull" essay collections of C. S. Lewis, but mostly because it's audience is different than most of his essays are for. These are literary essays, and I would suspect that one who is familiar with all the works Lewis mention and discusses would find much more meat and joy in reading about them. There are some Essays that I found better than the rest, like the one about Bunyan resonated understandably more because I had read The Pilgrim's Progress. Many of the others went over my head. A few were dense but understandably so, but none really were written for the common man.
Then, once in a while, Lewis shines witch quotables like "For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition."
That is why, reading through the corpus of Lewis, even some lesser hyped collections are still worth it.
Then, once in a while, Lewis shines witch quotables like "For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition."
That is why, reading through the corpus of Lewis, even some lesser hyped collections are still worth it.
Want to read
May 21, 2018Preface (by Walter Hooper; read on Nov. 26, 2016)
vii: Lewis always wanted to be a poet, but he knew he wasn't very good (and went by a pseudonym, Clive Hamilton); he earned "First" in three Oxford exams (Mods, Greats, and English); he worked on long narrative poems, but only one was ever published
viii: he failed to ever join the ranks of his favorite poems, but he defended long narrative poetry to the moderns who loved free verse; Lewis read a paper on William Morris at a Martlet Society meeting, and he defended long narrative poetry to those who agree with Poe that long narrative poetry doesn't work (maybe moderns aren't working hard enough; "art demands co-operation between the artist and his audience"; quotations from Paradise Lost and Spenser)
ix: Lewis couldn't find employment, and he wasn't successful as a poet, so he began work on literary essays (Chaucer/Boccaccio), and he hated his own prose style
x: Lewis was delighted to hear Mozart described as someone who remained a boy his whole life
x–xii: Nevill Coghill's poetry notes on Lewis's paper on Spenser
xii: Lewis enjoyed debate; reference to An Experiment in Criticism
xii–xiii: two views of judging art; Lewis: judge a work on its own merit
xiii–xiv: Lewis leaned toward philosophy at first, but he was offered a fellowship in English; he writes in his diary that he didn't think he had what it took to be a philosopher (talk about a road not taken!—maybe we would have had more books like The Abolition of Man); Lewis's conversation sparkled because of his combination of English and Great Texts
xiv: Lewis was "striking treasure-trove almost daily in his English studies" (see p. xiii); had to dig deep to get the treasure (especially in Anglo-Saxon literature—not that it wasn't there, but that it was well concealed); Lewis loved clarity and hated obscure writing/writers
xv–xvi: Lewis didn't like Eliot initially (and even planned a prank at Eliot's expense), but when they met in person they became friends
xvi: Lewis knew he'd never be a great poet, and he predicted that all of the great long narrative poems are already in existence (e.g., Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Morris); reference to The Allegory of Love (and growing in skill)
xvii: see the bottom quote here (on ambition and joining the great poets)
xvii–xviii: as an editor, Hooper makes changes based on what he thinks Lewis meant; Lewis's memory was amazing (could quote hundreds of lines from Beowulf or Paradise Lost); Lewis cared about accuracy, but he did make (many) minor memory mistakes
xviii–xix: original publication locations of these essays; Hooper provides locations for Lewis's other essays
xx: Hooper thanks Tolkien, Farrer, Green, Barfield, Coghill, Warren Lewis, Priscilla Tolkien, and others
"What Chaucer really did to 'Il Filostrato'" (on Troilus and Creseyde)—read in late September 2016
27: people probably don't realize what liberties Chaucer took with the original source [by Boccaccio]; thesis: "I shall endeavour to show that the process which Il Filostrato underwent at Chaucer's hands was first and foremost a process of medievalization"
28–29: Chaucer wasn't rejecting courtly love, but transforming it by focusing on a narrative treatment (as opposed to a doctrinal treatment)—preaching and singing become a story; Chrétien [12c] had combined both doctrine and story ("in many of Chrétien's psychological passages one sees the embryonic allegory struggling to be born"), but the two had separated by Chaucer's day; Chaucer both "accepted the doctrines" and "had a narrative genius"; it's as if Chaucer were reaching back through the "slightly medieval" Boccaccio to the "genuinely medieval" Chrétien; we should be glad that Chaucer didn't know Chrétien's work well, because otherwise Chrétien (and not Boccaccio) would have served as a model for Chaucer, and Chaucer wouldn't have altered much
29–30: Lewis lists ways in which Chaucer diverges from Boccaccio
30–31: I. Chaucer contributed to the historic story of Troy (not to say that Chaucer thought it was real history, but that his attitude was different from that of Boccaccio, who treated the matter as something new); Chaucer's audience received Chaucer's work as connecting them to the past (like children who see a painting of a road and want to know where the road leads)—Chaucer adds background details (in Bs 1, 4, and 5) to Boccaccio's account (which provides a bare sketch of war—cf. Alarums within stage directions)
31–33: II. Chaucer was a pupil of rhetoricians; Dante's maxim [from his work on eloquence] that those who can elevate their language should do so; Chaucer amplified his original source; in B1, Boccaccio invokes a lady (lyrical turn), whereas Chaucer invokes the Muses (rhetorical turn); he begins B2 by apologizing for his work's deficiencies (typically medieval); in B2, Chaucer added a descriptio of the month of May (fits both courtly love and rhetoric); Chaucer's medievalization; Chaucer's amplification in B3 (e.g., circumlocutio, apostropha); B3 (stanzas 208–10) contains Troilus's alba (lyric in which lovers part at dawn); "rhetoricization [is] the common quality of many of Chaucer's additions"; examples of apostropha in B3 (including stanzas 117–20, which mirror Boethius)
33–35: III. Chaucer wrote to edify (doctrines, "sentences"; 20c historians overlook this) and to entertain (the two essential parts of a great story [cf. teach and delight])—just look at CT; Chaucer found Boccaccio deficient in doctrine, and inserted doctrinal sections (including the Boethian section on free will in B3); Chaucer does this frequently (examples from B3—could have been addressed in section II, above, on rhetoric [Middle Ages didn't distinguish between doctrine/rhetoric]); possible allusion to sententiae in the Franklin's Tale; more examples in B4 (Fortune's wheel); Lewis tackles Chaucer's treatment of Pandarus by considering the serious and humorous nature of doctrine (then and now); our current age may find sententiousness too funny (to our detriment); the doctrine of the mean (B1) and other serious passages provide both edification and humor (our age tends to miss the edification)
35: IV. "Chaucer approached his work as the poet of courtly love" (others were instructive, and even allegorical, but Chaucer "gives instruction by example in the course of a concrete story") 1. Boccaccio begins with a single-line prayer, whereas Chaucer's prayer is four stanzas long (the difference isn't so much one of expansion as it is of liturgy); 2. Chaucer drops a stanza from the scene in Book 1 where Troilus is in the temple talking about his success in love; 3. Boccaccio speaks of Troilus's falling in love, but Chaucer makes the god of love an "avenger of contempt" (as Chrétien, Ovid, and others had done); 4. Chaucer adds a clear moral in stanzas 34–37 (connected to the Epithalamium and the irresistibility of Love); 5. Boccaccio's Troilus scoffs "based on contempt for women" (he's almost atheistic regarding Venus), whereas Chaucer's Troilus scoffs based on the uncertainty of love (he's frustrated); 6. in stanzas 87–144 (Book 1), Chaucer alters the original "in the direction of medievalism"; Boccaccio's Troilus hesitates to reveal Criseyde's name because of her relationship to Pandarus, but Chaucer's Troilus exhibits courtly love in his hesitation based on a sense of his own inadequacy; Boccaccio's Pandarus responds (to the knowledge that it's Criseyde) by cynically dismissing female virtue as a non-obstacle, whereas Chaucer's Pandarus responds (to the knowledge that it's Criseyde) by suggesting that her virtue includes pity and thus a reason to hope for success; Chaucer adds passages "to delay the surrender" of Criseyde (in Boccaccio, she acts contrary to the code of courtly love); "Chaucer never forgets his erotically didactic purpose"; "Chaucer's Troilus actually produces on us an effect of greater realism and nature and freedom than its original"; "This poem is more lively and of deeper human appeal than its original. . . . This poem conforms more closely than its original to the system of courtly love. . . . [C]ourtly love itself . . . is at bottom more agreeable to those elements in human . . . nature"; "The world of Chrétien . . . and of Chaucer, is nearer to the world universal, is less of a closed system, than the world of Ovid, of Congreve, of Anatole France"; "certain medieval things are more universal, in that sense more classical, can claim more confidently a securus judicat [right judgment, conclusive verdict], than certain things of the Renaissance"; quote from Beowulf
"Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century'" (pub. in 1938)—read on May 21, 2018
106: growth of Donne's reputation over the last 50 years; Milton's reputation has declined; "It is not impossible to see why Donne's poetry should be overrated in the twentieth and underrated in the eighteenth century"
107: Wyatt is "a Donne with most of the genius left out"; "Dante . . . thinks of poetry as something to be made, to be 'adorned as much as possible', to have its 'true sense' hidden beneath a rich vesture of 'rhetorical colouring'"
109: Johnson and Grierson
111: "Donne made all other poetry sound less 'serious'"; "The preposterousness is the point. Donne intends to take your breath away by the combined subtlety and impudence of the steps that lead to his conclusion. . . . The paradox, the surprise, are essential; if you are not enjoying these you are not enjoying what Donne intended"; "The test case is 'The Flea'. If you think this very different from Donne's other poems you may be sure that you have no real taste for the real Donne"; "serious"
112: some people become "more rhetorical as anger increases"; "if we do not hold our breaths as we read, wondering in the middle of each complication how he will resolve it, and exclaiming at the end 'How ever did you think of that?' (Carew speaks of his 'fresh invention'), we are not enjoying Donne"
113: "literary Manichaeism—a dislike of peace and pleasure and heartsease simply as such"; "seriousness" again; Ben Jonson on Donne's irregular accent
113–14: "the opinions of the modern world [114] on the metre of any poet are, in general, of no value at all, because most modern readers of poetry do not know how to scan"
114: "We have agreed with the romantics in regarding sexual love as a subject of overwhelming importance, but hardly in anything else"
115: "the final transmutation of the medieval courtly love or romance of adultery into an equally romantic love that looked to marriage as its natural conclusion"; "Donne never for long gets rid of a medieval sense of the sinfulness of sexuality"; "Donne was bred a Roman Catholic"
116: "there is no understanding the period of the Reformation in England until we have grasped the fact that the quarrel between the Puritans and the Papists was not primarily a quarrel between rigorism and indulgence, and that, in so far as it was, the rigorism was on the Roman side. On many questions, and specially in their view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party; if we may without disrespect so use the name of a great Roman Catholic, a great writer, and a great man, they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally"; "Puritan theology, so far from being grim and gloomy, seemed to More to err in the direction of fantastic optimism"
116–17: "If Luther is [117] right, we have waked from nightmare into sunshine: if he is wrong, we have entered a fools paradise"; "Catholics . . . have needlessly tormented us with scruples"
117: "Luther's marriage (as [More] called it) or Luther's 'abominable bichery' (if you prefer) became almost a symbol"; "the conversion of courtly love into romantic monogamous love was so largely the work of English, and even of Puritan, poets"; "Donne contributes so little to that movement"
117–18: three levels of Donne's sentiment (simple appetite is the lowest in complexity, ostentatious virtuous love is the highest, and Donne's love poetry is the the middle of these two extremes
119: five grim themes: "the sorrow of parting (including death), the miseries of secrecy, the falseness of the mistress, the fickleness of Donne, and . . . contempt for love itself"
122: "Donne is always arguing. There are puzzles in his work, but we can solve them all if we are clever enough"; "Of all literary virtues 'originality', in the vulgar sense, has, for this reason, the shortest life. When we have once mastered a poem by Donne there is nothing more to do with it."
123: "Donne's love poetry is parasitic. I do not use this word as a term of reproach . . . . Donne's love poems could not exist unless poems of a more genial character existed first"; "in the main, his love poetry is Hamlet without the prince"
125: "Donne was a 'good influence'—a better influence than many greater poets. It would hardly be too much to say that the final cause of Donne's poetry is the poetry of Herbert, Crashaw, and Marvell; for the very qualities which make Donne's kind of poetry unsatisfying poetic food make it a valuable ingredient"
vii: Lewis always wanted to be a poet, but he knew he wasn't very good (and went by a pseudonym, Clive Hamilton); he earned "First" in three Oxford exams (Mods, Greats, and English); he worked on long narrative poems, but only one was ever published
viii: he failed to ever join the ranks of his favorite poems, but he defended long narrative poetry to the moderns who loved free verse; Lewis read a paper on William Morris at a Martlet Society meeting, and he defended long narrative poetry to those who agree with Poe that long narrative poetry doesn't work (maybe moderns aren't working hard enough; "art demands co-operation between the artist and his audience"; quotations from Paradise Lost and Spenser)
ix: Lewis couldn't find employment, and he wasn't successful as a poet, so he began work on literary essays (Chaucer/Boccaccio), and he hated his own prose style
x: Lewis was delighted to hear Mozart described as someone who remained a boy his whole life
x–xii: Nevill Coghill's poetry notes on Lewis's paper on Spenser
xii: Lewis enjoyed debate; reference to An Experiment in Criticism
xii–xiii: two views of judging art; Lewis: judge a work on its own merit
xiii–xiv: Lewis leaned toward philosophy at first, but he was offered a fellowship in English; he writes in his diary that he didn't think he had what it took to be a philosopher (talk about a road not taken!—maybe we would have had more books like The Abolition of Man); Lewis's conversation sparkled because of his combination of English and Great Texts
xiv: Lewis was "striking treasure-trove almost daily in his English studies" (see p. xiii); had to dig deep to get the treasure (especially in Anglo-Saxon literature—not that it wasn't there, but that it was well concealed); Lewis loved clarity and hated obscure writing/writers
xv–xvi: Lewis didn't like Eliot initially (and even planned a prank at Eliot's expense), but when they met in person they became friends
xvi: Lewis knew he'd never be a great poet, and he predicted that all of the great long narrative poems are already in existence (e.g., Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Morris); reference to The Allegory of Love (and growing in skill)
xvii: see the bottom quote here (on ambition and joining the great poets)
xvii–xviii: as an editor, Hooper makes changes based on what he thinks Lewis meant; Lewis's memory was amazing (could quote hundreds of lines from Beowulf or Paradise Lost); Lewis cared about accuracy, but he did make (many) minor memory mistakes
xviii–xix: original publication locations of these essays; Hooper provides locations for Lewis's other essays
xx: Hooper thanks Tolkien, Farrer, Green, Barfield, Coghill, Warren Lewis, Priscilla Tolkien, and others
"What Chaucer really did to 'Il Filostrato'" (on Troilus and Creseyde)—read in late September 2016
27: people probably don't realize what liberties Chaucer took with the original source [by Boccaccio]; thesis: "I shall endeavour to show that the process which Il Filostrato underwent at Chaucer's hands was first and foremost a process of medievalization"
28–29: Chaucer wasn't rejecting courtly love, but transforming it by focusing on a narrative treatment (as opposed to a doctrinal treatment)—preaching and singing become a story; Chrétien [12c] had combined both doctrine and story ("in many of Chrétien's psychological passages one sees the embryonic allegory struggling to be born"), but the two had separated by Chaucer's day; Chaucer both "accepted the doctrines" and "had a narrative genius"; it's as if Chaucer were reaching back through the "slightly medieval" Boccaccio to the "genuinely medieval" Chrétien; we should be glad that Chaucer didn't know Chrétien's work well, because otherwise Chrétien (and not Boccaccio) would have served as a model for Chaucer, and Chaucer wouldn't have altered much
29–30: Lewis lists ways in which Chaucer diverges from Boccaccio
30–31: I. Chaucer contributed to the historic story of Troy (not to say that Chaucer thought it was real history, but that his attitude was different from that of Boccaccio, who treated the matter as something new); Chaucer's audience received Chaucer's work as connecting them to the past (like children who see a painting of a road and want to know where the road leads)—Chaucer adds background details (in Bs 1, 4, and 5) to Boccaccio's account (which provides a bare sketch of war—cf. Alarums within stage directions)
31–33: II. Chaucer was a pupil of rhetoricians; Dante's maxim [from his work on eloquence] that those who can elevate their language should do so; Chaucer amplified his original source; in B1, Boccaccio invokes a lady (lyrical turn), whereas Chaucer invokes the Muses (rhetorical turn); he begins B2 by apologizing for his work's deficiencies (typically medieval); in B2, Chaucer added a descriptio of the month of May (fits both courtly love and rhetoric); Chaucer's medievalization; Chaucer's amplification in B3 (e.g., circumlocutio, apostropha); B3 (stanzas 208–10) contains Troilus's alba (lyric in which lovers part at dawn); "rhetoricization [is] the common quality of many of Chaucer's additions"; examples of apostropha in B3 (including stanzas 117–20, which mirror Boethius)
33–35: III. Chaucer wrote to edify (doctrines, "sentences"; 20c historians overlook this) and to entertain (the two essential parts of a great story [cf. teach and delight])—just look at CT; Chaucer found Boccaccio deficient in doctrine, and inserted doctrinal sections (including the Boethian section on free will in B3); Chaucer does this frequently (examples from B3—could have been addressed in section II, above, on rhetoric [Middle Ages didn't distinguish between doctrine/rhetoric]); possible allusion to sententiae in the Franklin's Tale; more examples in B4 (Fortune's wheel); Lewis tackles Chaucer's treatment of Pandarus by considering the serious and humorous nature of doctrine (then and now); our current age may find sententiousness too funny (to our detriment); the doctrine of the mean (B1) and other serious passages provide both edification and humor (our age tends to miss the edification)
35: IV. "Chaucer approached his work as the poet of courtly love" (others were instructive, and even allegorical, but Chaucer "gives instruction by example in the course of a concrete story") 1. Boccaccio begins with a single-line prayer, whereas Chaucer's prayer is four stanzas long (the difference isn't so much one of expansion as it is of liturgy); 2. Chaucer drops a stanza from the scene in Book 1 where Troilus is in the temple talking about his success in love; 3. Boccaccio speaks of Troilus's falling in love, but Chaucer makes the god of love an "avenger of contempt" (as Chrétien, Ovid, and others had done); 4. Chaucer adds a clear moral in stanzas 34–37 (connected to the Epithalamium and the irresistibility of Love); 5. Boccaccio's Troilus scoffs "based on contempt for women" (he's almost atheistic regarding Venus), whereas Chaucer's Troilus scoffs based on the uncertainty of love (he's frustrated); 6. in stanzas 87–144 (Book 1), Chaucer alters the original "in the direction of medievalism"; Boccaccio's Troilus hesitates to reveal Criseyde's name because of her relationship to Pandarus, but Chaucer's Troilus exhibits courtly love in his hesitation based on a sense of his own inadequacy; Boccaccio's Pandarus responds (to the knowledge that it's Criseyde) by cynically dismissing female virtue as a non-obstacle, whereas Chaucer's Pandarus responds (to the knowledge that it's Criseyde) by suggesting that her virtue includes pity and thus a reason to hope for success; Chaucer adds passages "to delay the surrender" of Criseyde (in Boccaccio, she acts contrary to the code of courtly love); "Chaucer never forgets his erotically didactic purpose"; "Chaucer's Troilus actually produces on us an effect of greater realism and nature and freedom than its original"; "This poem is more lively and of deeper human appeal than its original. . . . This poem conforms more closely than its original to the system of courtly love. . . . [C]ourtly love itself . . . is at bottom more agreeable to those elements in human . . . nature"; "The world of Chrétien . . . and of Chaucer, is nearer to the world universal, is less of a closed system, than the world of Ovid, of Congreve, of Anatole France"; "certain medieval things are more universal, in that sense more classical, can claim more confidently a securus judicat [right judgment, conclusive verdict], than certain things of the Renaissance"; quote from Beowulf
"Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century'" (pub. in 1938)—read on May 21, 2018
106: growth of Donne's reputation over the last 50 years; Milton's reputation has declined; "It is not impossible to see why Donne's poetry should be overrated in the twentieth and underrated in the eighteenth century"
107: Wyatt is "a Donne with most of the genius left out"; "Dante . . . thinks of poetry as something to be made, to be 'adorned as much as possible', to have its 'true sense' hidden beneath a rich vesture of 'rhetorical colouring'"
109: Johnson and Grierson
111: "Donne made all other poetry sound less 'serious'"; "The preposterousness is the point. Donne intends to take your breath away by the combined subtlety and impudence of the steps that lead to his conclusion. . . . The paradox, the surprise, are essential; if you are not enjoying these you are not enjoying what Donne intended"; "The test case is 'The Flea'. If you think this very different from Donne's other poems you may be sure that you have no real taste for the real Donne"; "serious"
112: some people become "more rhetorical as anger increases"; "if we do not hold our breaths as we read, wondering in the middle of each complication how he will resolve it, and exclaiming at the end 'How ever did you think of that?' (Carew speaks of his 'fresh invention'), we are not enjoying Donne"
113: "literary Manichaeism—a dislike of peace and pleasure and heartsease simply as such"; "seriousness" again; Ben Jonson on Donne's irregular accent
113–14: "the opinions of the modern world [114] on the metre of any poet are, in general, of no value at all, because most modern readers of poetry do not know how to scan"
114: "We have agreed with the romantics in regarding sexual love as a subject of overwhelming importance, but hardly in anything else"
115: "the final transmutation of the medieval courtly love or romance of adultery into an equally romantic love that looked to marriage as its natural conclusion"; "Donne never for long gets rid of a medieval sense of the sinfulness of sexuality"; "Donne was bred a Roman Catholic"
116: "there is no understanding the period of the Reformation in England until we have grasped the fact that the quarrel between the Puritans and the Papists was not primarily a quarrel between rigorism and indulgence, and that, in so far as it was, the rigorism was on the Roman side. On many questions, and specially in their view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party; if we may without disrespect so use the name of a great Roman Catholic, a great writer, and a great man, they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally"; "Puritan theology, so far from being grim and gloomy, seemed to More to err in the direction of fantastic optimism"
116–17: "If Luther is [117] right, we have waked from nightmare into sunshine: if he is wrong, we have entered a fools paradise"; "Catholics . . . have needlessly tormented us with scruples"
117: "Luther's marriage (as [More] called it) or Luther's 'abominable bichery' (if you prefer) became almost a symbol"; "the conversion of courtly love into romantic monogamous love was so largely the work of English, and even of Puritan, poets"; "Donne contributes so little to that movement"
117–18: three levels of Donne's sentiment (simple appetite is the lowest in complexity, ostentatious virtuous love is the highest, and Donne's love poetry is the the middle of these two extremes
119: five grim themes: "the sorrow of parting (including death), the miseries of secrecy, the falseness of the mistress, the fickleness of Donne, and . . . contempt for love itself"
122: "Donne is always arguing. There are puzzles in his work, but we can solve them all if we are clever enough"; "Of all literary virtues 'originality', in the vulgar sense, has, for this reason, the shortest life. When we have once mastered a poem by Donne there is nothing more to do with it."
123: "Donne's love poetry is parasitic. I do not use this word as a term of reproach . . . . Donne's love poems could not exist unless poems of a more genial character existed first"; "in the main, his love poetry is Hamlet without the prince"
125: "Donne was a 'good influence'—a better influence than many greater poets. It would hardly be too much to say that the final cause of Donne's poetry is the poetry of Herbert, Crashaw, and Marvell; for the very qualities which make Donne's kind of poetry unsatisfying poetic food make it a valuable ingredient"
September 3, 2024
There's a reason institutions like The New York Times continually expand their opinion sections, even at the occasional expense of actual journalism. Essays are just so fun to read! There's a leisureliness to them. You just stop and read one, maybe two, then continue on with your day and read another one or two later. Essays are the colorful small town gas stations that invite you (or maybe not) to take a break and relax, learn something new while you move on the road trip of each day. They are a quick way to expose yourself to a new idea that can be reflected on later while you work. At their best they combine deep insight with engaging wit, and the whole thing goes down like a nice little snack—unlike a nonfiction book which more often goes down like a hotdog eating contest.
There are problems, though, with going online and reading essays, blog posts, or what have you. Eventually you reach the point where you start think, "Hmm... you know it seems like most of the people writing these aren't very smart." And then you become so iron-hearted that you can hardly take anyone's opinion online seriously. I suppose that's just the price of an information ecosystem wherein everyone's got an opinion and the ability to share it. This problem is rectified by reading a collection of essays like this of C.S. Lewis. Lewis is no idiot, of course.
But when you keep reading essays, even a book collection by such a man as Lewis, there becomes a second problem too. Each person only has a few things that are really worth hearing, and to continually hear them is soon to grow tired of hearing them. There's a reason marriage is so trying.
Lewis has a few themes he likes to go back to over and over. One of them would be the importance of enjoyment as a criterion of criticism. He puts this most directly in the essay, "Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem," where he writes, "Artistic failure is not in itself interesting in any way; artistic success always is. To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellences will even begin to compensate for failure in this, and very serious faults will be covered by this, as by charity" (103). The corollary to this elevation of interest as the chief end of art Lewis puts forward in "High and Low Brows."
One of the other major themes of Selected Literary Essays is the population's increasing inability to recognize and understand poetical meter. This theme was my favorite of the book, and his treatment of it reignited my interest in poetry. Some of my favorite essays were "The Alliterative Metre," "The Fifteenth-Century Heroic Line," and "Metre." Apparently, the situation in Lewis's day was so bad that Oxford students didn't even know what a foot was. I found for myself, not surprisingly, that although I knew what feet were and in some sense how to "calculate" a meter, I still really did not know how to read a poem. It would have been nice, forget what I said about competitive eating, it would have been nice had Lewis written a whole book on how to read poetry!
With Selected Literary Essays you get what you might expect. Some enjoyable, thoughtful pieces of literary criticism. There are some I disagreed with, (e.g. "Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century) some I agreed with completely and fully, ("De Descriptione Temporum") some on subjects I knew little about, ("Shelley, Dryden, and Mr Eliot") and some on familiar subjects ("A Note on Jane Austen"). All contained some nugget of wisdom that made the essay rewarding, even if the reading of it may have been a little trying. They were mostly not too trying though, as Lewis writes in that kind of nineteenth century way that deals in generalities and only quotes text to support the major points. It was a good way of writing that critics used to have. Selected Literary Essays is a good book.
There are problems, though, with going online and reading essays, blog posts, or what have you. Eventually you reach the point where you start think, "Hmm... you know it seems like most of the people writing these aren't very smart." And then you become so iron-hearted that you can hardly take anyone's opinion online seriously. I suppose that's just the price of an information ecosystem wherein everyone's got an opinion and the ability to share it. This problem is rectified by reading a collection of essays like this of C.S. Lewis. Lewis is no idiot, of course.
But when you keep reading essays, even a book collection by such a man as Lewis, there becomes a second problem too. Each person only has a few things that are really worth hearing, and to continually hear them is soon to grow tired of hearing them. There's a reason marriage is so trying.
Lewis has a few themes he likes to go back to over and over. One of them would be the importance of enjoyment as a criterion of criticism. He puts this most directly in the essay, "Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem," where he writes, "Artistic failure is not in itself interesting in any way; artistic success always is. To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellences will even begin to compensate for failure in this, and very serious faults will be covered by this, as by charity" (103). The corollary to this elevation of interest as the chief end of art Lewis puts forward in "High and Low Brows."
A man ought not to be ashamed of reading a good book because it is simple and popular, and he ought not to condone the faults of a bad book because it is simple and popular. He should be able to say (altering the names to suit his own judgement),'I read Buchan and Eliot for the same reason, because I think them good; I leave Edgar Wallace and Ezra Pound for the same reason, because I think them bad.' (278)Unfortunately, despite this recurring theme, Lewis fails to develop it in any of the essays in this collection. For example, a question to the point of the second quoted passage would be "If a book is popular, how can it be bad? Isn't it's popularity evidence that it is interesting, and therefore, according to your criteria, good?" I suppose he might reply saying something to the effect that the interest most people find in a bad popular work is not genuine interest but an illusion, the hijacking of the mind by addictive techniques. Fortunately for Lewis, the world he lived in was not dominated by poptimism the way ours is—but the fact that he wasn't able to see it coming, or that he saw it coming but didn't address it, is a flaw.
One of the other major themes of Selected Literary Essays is the population's increasing inability to recognize and understand poetical meter. This theme was my favorite of the book, and his treatment of it reignited my interest in poetry. Some of my favorite essays were "The Alliterative Metre," "The Fifteenth-Century Heroic Line," and "Metre." Apparently, the situation in Lewis's day was so bad that Oxford students didn't even know what a foot was. I found for myself, not surprisingly, that although I knew what feet were and in some sense how to "calculate" a meter, I still really did not know how to read a poem. It would have been nice, forget what I said about competitive eating, it would have been nice had Lewis written a whole book on how to read poetry!
With Selected Literary Essays you get what you might expect. Some enjoyable, thoughtful pieces of literary criticism. There are some I disagreed with, (e.g. "Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century) some I agreed with completely and fully, ("De Descriptione Temporum") some on subjects I knew little about, ("Shelley, Dryden, and Mr Eliot") and some on familiar subjects ("A Note on Jane Austen"). All contained some nugget of wisdom that made the essay rewarding, even if the reading of it may have been a little trying. They were mostly not too trying though, as Lewis writes in that kind of nineteenth century way that deals in generalities and only quotes text to support the major points. It was a good way of writing that critics used to have. Selected Literary Essays is a good book.
May 27, 2025
This collection covers most of Lewis's essays on literature from throughout the many decades of his career. The variety of topics covered is frankly astounding. Lewis is able to comment, with some authority, on quite a few literary niches.
Of course some of the essays are better than others. The two essays on meter are complete bores. But many are rather brilliant. Lewis manages to articulate the weaknesses and strengths of every writer he discusses, giving a fair and balanced image of each. What this often translates to is that he addresses the counterarguments to his point often before one could articulate it.
A mostly well written and quite impressive collection all around. "A Note on Jane Austen" is particularly good, for all the Austen scholars out there.
Of course some of the essays are better than others. The two essays on meter are complete bores. But many are rather brilliant. Lewis manages to articulate the weaknesses and strengths of every writer he discusses, giving a fair and balanced image of each. What this often translates to is that he addresses the counterarguments to his point often before one could articulate it.
A mostly well written and quite impressive collection all around. "A Note on Jane Austen" is particularly good, for all the Austen scholars out there.
September 6, 2021
I loved this collection, especially "The Anthropological Approach" and "Variation in Shakespeare and Others."
Throughout, there's nice synergy with his other works (both his fiction and his better-known critical essays). For example, the essay "High and Low Brows" explores some ideas he more fully develops in "An Experiment in Literary Criticism." (Spoiler alert: Lewis considers the terms Lowbrow and Highbrow "odious" – although he recognizes they "bid fair to oust all their rivals" – and debunks many easy assumptions about these purported classifications and their relative qualities.)
He speaks insightfully about literary influence in "The Literary Impact of the Authorised Version" (along the way distinguishing mere 'sources' from 'influence'), delightfully critiques certain strands of contemporary literary criticism (perhaps most strongly in the last two essays).
A few items I happened to note in passing:
* "If female spiders, whose grooms (I am told) do 'coldly furnish forth the marriage tables', wrote love-poetry, it would be like Marlowe's." pp. 61-62
* "Licentious poetry, if it is to remain endurable, must generally be heartless[.] If it attempts pathos or sweetness an abyss opens at the poet's feet." p. 62
* In discussing Donne's less successful love poetry: "What any sensible woman would make of such a wooing it is difficult to imagine – or would be difficult if we forgot the amazing protective faculty which each sex possesses of not listening to the other." p. 118. (This provides some balance and context to the comment in That Hideous Strength about husbands not listening to wives.)
* Lewis identifies "the lure of the 'Inner Ring'" as a core aspect of Kipling's stories, and recognizes it (as Kipling apparently does not) as a morally neutral power which can be used for good or for evil. "The confidential glance or rebuke from a colleague is indeed the means whereby a weak brother is brought or kept up to the standard of a noble profession; it is also the means whereby a new and hitherto innocent member is initiated into the corruption of a bad one." p. 248. (This is a theme Lewis explored more than once in his own works, I believe; the one that leaps most strongly to mind is Mark Studdock in That Hideous Strength.)
* "That She, in her secular loneliness, should have become a sage, is very proper, and indeed essential to Haggard's story, but Haggard has not himself the wisdom wherewith to supply her. A poet of Dante's depth could have given her things really wise to say; a poet of Shakespeare's address would have made us believe in her wisdom without committing himself." p. 269
* "The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are: that good fortune I have enjoyed for nearly twenty years." p. 99
* "And when the plain man has been captured and made into a pathetically willing and bewildered university student he will sometimes praise the great works which he has dutifully read and not enjoyed, for the excellence of their style. [...] He thinks of [style] not as the linguistic means by which the writer produces whatever results he desires but as a sort of extra – an uncovenanted pedantry tacked on to the book proper, to gratify some specifically 'literary' or 'critical' taste which has nothing to do with the ordinary pleasures of the imagination. It is for him a meaningless addition which, by a convention, gives access to a higher rank – like the letters Esq. after a man's name on an envelope." p. 271.
* "Bercilak is as vivid and concrete as any image I have met in literature. He is [...] half giant, yet wholly a 'lovely knight'; as full of demoniac energy as old Karamazov, yet, in his own house, as jolly as a Dickensian Christmas host; now exhibiting a ferocity so gleeful that it is almost genial, and now a geniality so outrageous that it borders on the ferocious; half boy or buffoon in his shouts and laughter and jumpings; yet at the end judging Gawain with the tranquil superiority of an angelic being. There has been nothing really like him in fiction before or since." p. 304. (And yet, except for the very last clause, could this not describe Tom Bombadil? I would note that this essay "was originally published in English and Medieval Studies Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday" in 1962 [p. xix].)
* "Myth is thus like manna; it is to each man a different dish and to each the dish he needs. It does not grow old nor stick at frontiers racial, sexual, or philosophic; and even from the same man at the same moment it can elicit different responses at different levels. But great myth is rare in a reflective age; the temptation to allegorize, to thrust into the story the conscious doctrines of the poet, there to fight it out as best they can with the inherent tendency of the fable, is usually too strong." p. 205.
Throughout, there's nice synergy with his other works (both his fiction and his better-known critical essays). For example, the essay "High and Low Brows" explores some ideas he more fully develops in "An Experiment in Literary Criticism." (Spoiler alert: Lewis considers the terms Lowbrow and Highbrow "odious" – although he recognizes they "bid fair to oust all their rivals" – and debunks many easy assumptions about these purported classifications and their relative qualities.)
He speaks insightfully about literary influence in "The Literary Impact of the Authorised Version" (along the way distinguishing mere 'sources' from 'influence'), delightfully critiques certain strands of contemporary literary criticism (perhaps most strongly in the last two essays).
A few items I happened to note in passing:
* "If female spiders, whose grooms (I am told) do 'coldly furnish forth the marriage tables', wrote love-poetry, it would be like Marlowe's." pp. 61-62
* "Licentious poetry, if it is to remain endurable, must generally be heartless[.] If it attempts pathos or sweetness an abyss opens at the poet's feet." p. 62
* In discussing Donne's less successful love poetry: "What any sensible woman would make of such a wooing it is difficult to imagine – or would be difficult if we forgot the amazing protective faculty which each sex possesses of not listening to the other." p. 118. (This provides some balance and context to the comment in That Hideous Strength about husbands not listening to wives.)
* Lewis identifies "the lure of the 'Inner Ring'" as a core aspect of Kipling's stories, and recognizes it (as Kipling apparently does not) as a morally neutral power which can be used for good or for evil. "The confidential glance or rebuke from a colleague is indeed the means whereby a weak brother is brought or kept up to the standard of a noble profession; it is also the means whereby a new and hitherto innocent member is initiated into the corruption of a bad one." p. 248. (This is a theme Lewis explored more than once in his own works, I believe; the one that leaps most strongly to mind is Mark Studdock in That Hideous Strength.)
* "That She, in her secular loneliness, should have become a sage, is very proper, and indeed essential to Haggard's story, but Haggard has not himself the wisdom wherewith to supply her. A poet of Dante's depth could have given her things really wise to say; a poet of Shakespeare's address would have made us believe in her wisdom without committing himself." p. 269
* "The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are: that good fortune I have enjoyed for nearly twenty years." p. 99
* "And when the plain man has been captured and made into a pathetically willing and bewildered university student he will sometimes praise the great works which he has dutifully read and not enjoyed, for the excellence of their style. [...] He thinks of [style] not as the linguistic means by which the writer produces whatever results he desires but as a sort of extra – an uncovenanted pedantry tacked on to the book proper, to gratify some specifically 'literary' or 'critical' taste which has nothing to do with the ordinary pleasures of the imagination. It is for him a meaningless addition which, by a convention, gives access to a higher rank – like the letters Esq. after a man's name on an envelope." p. 271.
* "Bercilak is as vivid and concrete as any image I have met in literature. He is [...] half giant, yet wholly a 'lovely knight'; as full of demoniac energy as old Karamazov, yet, in his own house, as jolly as a Dickensian Christmas host; now exhibiting a ferocity so gleeful that it is almost genial, and now a geniality so outrageous that it borders on the ferocious; half boy or buffoon in his shouts and laughter and jumpings; yet at the end judging Gawain with the tranquil superiority of an angelic being. There has been nothing really like him in fiction before or since." p. 304. (And yet, except for the very last clause, could this not describe Tom Bombadil? I would note that this essay "was originally published in English and Medieval Studies Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday" in 1962 [p. xix].)
* "Myth is thus like manna; it is to each man a different dish and to each the dish he needs. It does not grow old nor stick at frontiers racial, sexual, or philosophic; and even from the same man at the same moment it can elicit different responses at different levels. But great myth is rare in a reflective age; the temptation to allegorize, to thrust into the story the conscious doctrines of the poet, there to fight it out as best they can with the inherent tendency of the fable, is usually too strong." p. 205.
May 7, 2025
I found Lewis’ essay on language and metaphor to be incredibly helpful. With a succinct style and a few examples, he puts to flight the idea of “science as reality”, since, if language cannot be without metaphor, how can our scientific understanding not be a model “as metaphor.” Owen Barfield and Michael Polanyi point to the same struggle within modern culture that has bifurcated the world and subsequently dismissed the possibility of a reality beyond our senses and models. Proper meaning in language can only be through metaphor, and used rightly it can press into and find the mean of that envelope which surrounds the mysterious but true realities of life. The key is to recognize the metaphors and not presume to be communicating “literally.”
“But it must not be supposed that I am in any sense putting forward the imagination as the organ of truth. We are not talking of truth, but of meaning: meaning which is the antecedent condition both of truth and falsehood, whose antithesis is not error but nonsense. I am a rationalist. For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition. It is, I confess, undeniable that such a view indirectly implies a kind of truth or rightness in the imagination itself. I said at the outset that the truth we won by metaphor could not be greater than the truth [behind] the metaphor itself; and we have seen since that all our truth, or all but a few fragments, is won by metaphor.”
“But it must not be supposed that I am in any sense putting forward the imagination as the organ of truth. We are not talking of truth, but of meaning: meaning which is the antecedent condition both of truth and falsehood, whose antithesis is not error but nonsense. I am a rationalist. For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition. It is, I confess, undeniable that such a view indirectly implies a kind of truth or rightness in the imagination itself. I said at the outset that the truth we won by metaphor could not be greater than the truth [behind] the metaphor itself; and we have seen since that all our truth, or all but a few fragments, is won by metaphor.”
September 3, 2023
1 De Descriptione Temporum
2 The Alliterative Metre
3 What Chaucer really did to Il Filostrato
4 The Fifteenth-Century Heroic Line
5 Hero and Leander
6 Variation in Shakespeare and Others
7 Hamlet: The Prince or The Poem?
8 Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century
9 The Literary Impact of the Authorised Version
10 The Vision of John Bunyan
11 Addison
12 Four-Letter Words
13 A Note on Jane Austen
14 Shelley, Dryden, and Mr Eliot
15 Sir Walter Scott
16 William Morris
17 Kipling's World
18 Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare
19 High and Low Brows
20 Metre
21 Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism
22 The Anthropological Approach
2 The Alliterative Metre
3 What Chaucer really did to Il Filostrato
4 The Fifteenth-Century Heroic Line
5 Hero and Leander
6 Variation in Shakespeare and Others
7 Hamlet: The Prince or The Poem?
8 Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century
9 The Literary Impact of the Authorised Version
10 The Vision of John Bunyan
11 Addison
12 Four-Letter Words
13 A Note on Jane Austen
14 Shelley, Dryden, and Mr Eliot
15 Sir Walter Scott
16 William Morris
17 Kipling's World
18 Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare
19 High and Low Brows
20 Metre
21 Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism
22 The Anthropological Approach
July 23, 2019
I found myself devouring some of these essays (and leaving sticky notes all through the two that discussed Shakespeare) and skimming over others. They all seemed to me to be very "classic Lewis", and if they dealt with a subject you are at all interested in, are valuable and worth reading.
September 13, 2021
Skimmed.
September 18, 2024
Depending on what I had read of the background literature the Essays were good. I enjoyed the translations of the Bible, Jane Austin, Kipling and William Morris. Less so Dryden etc.
March 5, 2014
This is what I was looking for when I read and was a bit disappointed by "On Stories." That collection had some good pieces (On Stories and George Orwell, especially. I thought I'd enjoy his discussion of Tolkien's work, but I didn't.), but it was mostly quite dated. THIS book, however, is excellent. Here, Lewis is talking about authors I know, and what he has to say is well worth my reading time. I've only read a couple of the essays so far, but most of them look very tempting (though I'll admit that Alliterative Meter was daunting -- I'll tackle it again another time). Hamlet alone was worth the cost of the book!
*Okay, finished it. Excellent! I skipped a few ("Alliterative Meter," "What Chaucer really did to 'Il Filostrato'," "The Fifteenth Century Heroic Line," and "Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism") but most of them were very interesting. The ones on Shakespeare were among the best, but I also really enjoyed Kipling, Austen, Bunyan, Addison, Donne, and the Authorized Version of the Bible. After reading the essay on William Morris I downloaded a couple of his fantasies (who knows if I'll really find time for them) -- Lewis just made him sound so intriguing!
*Okay, finished it. Excellent! I skipped a few ("Alliterative Meter," "What Chaucer really did to 'Il Filostrato'," "The Fifteenth Century Heroic Line," and "Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism") but most of them were very interesting. The ones on Shakespeare were among the best, but I also really enjoyed Kipling, Austen, Bunyan, Addison, Donne, and the Authorized Version of the Bible. After reading the essay on William Morris I downloaded a couple of his fantasies (who knows if I'll really find time for them) -- Lewis just made him sound so intriguing!
November 15, 2013
A simply amazing book in which Lewis alternates in painting literature as it just so happens to strike us and disbanding some theories and unhelpful modes of reading.
He makes me want to read (or re-read) Troilus and Cressida (Chaucer), Hero and Leander, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Shelley, Bunyan, Jane Austen, and Morris. On the other hand, Donne, Dryden, and Kipling get some pretty hard knocks.
Bluspels and Flalansferes is brilliant; probably the best one in the book besides the Hamlet essay.
He destroys Freudian Theories, High/Low brow distinctions, and Anthropological criticism quite handily and with the restraint of one pulling the fist way back for a unanswerable punch.
He does have some denser sections on rhythm, but that's my fault for being a philistine with poetry.
He makes me want to read (or re-read) Troilus and Cressida (Chaucer), Hero and Leander, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Shelley, Bunyan, Jane Austen, and Morris. On the other hand, Donne, Dryden, and Kipling get some pretty hard knocks.
Bluspels and Flalansferes is brilliant; probably the best one in the book besides the Hamlet essay.
He destroys Freudian Theories, High/Low brow distinctions, and Anthropological criticism quite handily and with the restraint of one pulling the fist way back for a unanswerable punch.
He does have some denser sections on rhythm, but that's my fault for being a philistine with poetry.
December 27, 2009
I took Lewis' Mere Christianity advice, where he tells the reader to skip what he doesn't understand/ doesn't interest him. I skipped so darn much of this book. It seemed half Italian or Latin or medieval! The parts I did read, particularly "Bluspels and Flalansferes" and "Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism" (which are, I understand, well-known) were fantastic.
Also, having started learning some Greek (read: can recognize the alphabet) I had the thrill of my life when, in the "Four Letter Words" section, I recognized a bad word in a different language. Education isn't always what one thinks it is.
Also, having started learning some Greek (read: can recognize the alphabet) I had the thrill of my life when, in the "Four Letter Words" section, I recognized a bad word in a different language. Education isn't always what one thinks it is.
February 15, 2023
This volume is really only for Lewis diehards. I was unfamiliar with many of the writers and works that Lewis was writing about and the debates he was engaged in were as esoteric as Medieval mysteries written in Old English. But I learned a lot about Malory and Kipling, Milton and Shakespeare. Again it was frustrating not being familiar with Latin so that the many Latin phrases were meaningless. It would have been nice to have some footnoting for the modern, less educated than our forefathers, readers. I think this is about the last Lewis book that I have not read, so re-reading will be the next step.
January 15, 2009
Simply fantastic. Outstanding.
January 23, 2010
A glorious set of essays. I don't particularly like or trust Walter Hooper, but his introduction was great as well. It's C. S. Lewis on literature. What's not to like?
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