Poems (posthumous collections)

Lewis wrote poetry throughout his life, often published in magazines under initials. His posthumous collections reveal a learned, playful poet, sometimes deeply moving.

Poems (1964) gathers the short poems he wrote after his conversion: religious poems, satires, poems about the planets (including The Planets, which inspired Michael Ward’s *Chronicles of Narnia* hypothesis), love poems and elegies for Joy. Narrative Poems (1969) adds Dymer and unfinished verse narratives, including The Queen of Drum. Lost Aeneid (2011) publishes what remains of his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, saved from the fire. The 2015 critical edition collects over 250 poems.

• Original title — Poems (1964) ; Narrative Poems (1969) ; The Collected Poems of C.S. Lewis (1994) ; C.S. Lewis's Lost Aeneid (2011)
• First English publication — 1964-2015
• Genre — Poetry
• First English edition — Geoffrey Bles, 1964 (ed. Walter Hooper) ; critical edition by Don W. King, Kent State University Press, 2015
• Available in bookstores — Not translated into French.
• Reading level — Variable
• For whom — For lovers of English poetry.
• Year — 1964

themes

• Faith and doubt.
• Medieval cosmos.
• Love and grief.
• Playing with old forms.

Family

Poetry

Other names

• Poems (1964)
• Narrative Poems (1969)
• The Collected Poems of C.S. Lewis (1994)
• C.S. Lewis's Lost Aeneid (2011)
• Poetry

Quick facts

How to approach it

Reading level: Variable. For lovers of English poetry.

Summary in a few lines

Poems (1964) gathers the short poems he wrote after his conversion: religious poems, satires, poems about the planets (including The Planets, which inspired Michael Ward’s *Chronicles of Narnia* hypothesis), love poems and elegies for Joy. Narrative Poems (1969) adds Dymer and unfinished verse narratives, including The Queen of Drum. Lost Aeneid (2011) publishes what remains of his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, saved from the fire. The 2015 critical edition collects over 250 poems.

In Lewis’s workshop

Lewis wanted to be a poet above all. He continued to write verses after 1926, but published them discreetly, often under the initials N.W. in the magazine Punch.

What announces Narnia

The poem The Planets (1935) describes the seven planets that Michael Ward identifies in the seven Chronicles.

What a modern reader retains

For a French-speaking reader, this poetry remains inaccessible due to lack of translation, which is unfortunate: it contains Lewis’s most intimate side, the one revealed in his poems for Joy. The poem The Planets even inspired one of the most discussed hypotheses about Narnia, Michael Ward’s.

His legacy

His poetry, long considered old-fashioned, has been rediscovered by critics since the 2000s.

Key ideas

• Faith and doubt.
• Medieval cosmos.
• Love and grief.
• Playing with old forms.

See also

• Spirits in Bondage
• Dymer
• The Image of the World

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis_bibliography
• https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis