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In the years immediately after his retirement from the Royal Army Service Corps on 21 December 1932, Captain Warren ‘Warnie’ Lewis expended most of his energy compiling the Lewis Papers, an extensive family archive that, by almost any measure, is an exceptional accomplishment. Shortly after finishing this massive yet pleasurable undertaking, Warnie turned to an even more delightful activity: sailing the waterways in and around Oxford and Cambridge on the Bosphorus, a small cabin cruiser he had specially built, therein realizing a life-long passion for ships and boats and reaching back to the childhood worlds of Animal Land and Boxen (shared with his younger brother), upon whose waters the first Bosphorus sailed. From 1936 until the outbreak of World War II, Warnie spent many days on his second Bosphorus, enjoying countless hours of relative freedom and personal satisfaction. This essay explores Warnie's days aboard his ‘ditchcrawler’, primarily through the lens of the eight essays he published in The Motor Boat and Yachting magazine in the late 1930s.

Since minutes were never taken of the Inklings’ meetings, it is not surprising that there is no complete, definitive record of when meetings occurred nor of who attended. To partly remedy this deficit, this essay offers a comprehensive chronological listing of their meetings from 1933 to 1954. Distinctions are drawn between documented meetings (where references occur about the meeting in a letter, journal, or other source) and possible meetings (where it is arguable that a meeting took place). In addition, for documented meetings, the essay identifies those present, where and when the gathering took place, and the specific source that supports the claim that the meeting occurred. The essay concludes with three brief observations about this chronology.

In the opening pages of C. S. Lewis's autobiography, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, he relates a story that explains the genesis of what he calls Sehnsucht. In brief, his brother Warren had constructed a toy garden in the lid of a biscuit tin that called to mind beauty and led him to experience joy. While the impact of this story has long been recognized as marking the central theme in the life and works of C. S. Lewis, what has not been noticed until now is how significant this incident is to the life and works of Warren Lewis (1895–1973). That is, in the making of that toy garden we see the defining mark of Warren's life: an approach that was tactile, practical, and utilitarian. While for Warren's younger brother the toy garden awakened a powerful, nurturing aesthetic sense, for Warren the episode illustrates that he was given to working with things, with objects in the world before him, and with the matters of everyday life. This essay explores Warren early life up until he entered Sandhurst in 1914, with a special focus upon his public school experiences at Wynyard School and Malvern College.

Although best known as the wife of C. S. Lewis, Joy Davidman was a gifted writer. As an enthusiastic Communist, her poetry, book reviews, and movie reviews often appeared in the New Masses (hereafter NM), the semi-official weekly magazine of Communist Party of the United States of American (CPUSA) from April 1938 through July 1945. (1) In addition, she published two novels, Anya (1940) and Weeping Bay (1950), and Smoke on the Mountain (1953), her interpretation of the Ten Commandments. Anya and Weeping Bay received modest but generally favorable critical scrutiny while Smoke on the Mountain continues to be read and quoted by those doing intensive study of the Decalogue. (2) It is as a poet, however, that she excelled; her Letter to a Comrade (1938) won both the Yale Younger Poet competition and the Russell Loines Memorial award for poetry given by the National Institute of Arts and Letters. (3) In what follows I sketch the development of Davidman as a poet, explore a thematic discussion of the poems in Letter to a Comrade, and offer a brief critical assessment of the volume as a whole. (4) Davidman identified herself as a poet as early as age fourteen in her autobiographical essay, "The Longest Way Round": When I was fourteen I went walking in the park on a Sunday afternoon, in clean, cold, luminous air. The trees tinkled with sleet; the city noises were muffled by the snow. Winter sunset, with a line of young maples sheathed in ice between me and the sun--as I looked up they burned unimaginably golden--burned and were not consumed. I heard the voice in the burning tree; the meaning of all things was revealed and the sacrament at the heart of all beauty lay bare; time and space fell away, and for a moment the world was only a door swinging ajar. Then the light faded, the cold stung my toes, and I went home, reflecting that I had had another aesthetic experience. I had them fairly often. That was what beautiful things did to you, I recognized, probably because of some visceral or glandular reaction that hadn't been fully explored by science just yet. For I was a well-brought-up, right-thinking child of materialism. Beauty, I knew, existed; but God, of course, did not .... A young poet like myself could be seized and shaken by spiritual powers a dozen times a day, and still take it for granted that there was no such thing as spirit. (5) (Bone 83-84; Way 14; Davidman's emphasis) Although this passage focuses upon her early atheism, it is marked by several poetic phrases, including, "clean, cold, luminous air," "trees tinkled with sleet," and "a line of young maples sheathed in ice" that "burned unimaginably golden." Moreover, she confesses that "a young poet like myself" was often in the grip of overwhelming aesthetic experiences. She then adds: Like most adolescents, I was really two people. The hard, cocksure young atheist was largely what psychologists call a "persona," a mask, a surface personality for dealing with the world. In the greedy, grabbing, big-city, middle-class world I knew, this seemed the sort of person that was wanted. But underneath the surface my own real personality stirred, stretched its wings, discovered its own tastes. It was a girl with vague eyes, who scribbled verses--scribbled them in a blind fury, not knowing what she wrote or why, and read them afterward with wonder. We call that fury "poetic inspiration" nowadays; we might be wiser to call it "prophecy." (Bone 86; Way 16) In addition, manuscripts containing examples of her earliest attempts at poetry confirm that from the age of fourteen Davidman self-identified as a poet who "scribbled verses ... in a blind fury." (6) At fifteen she matriculated at Hunter College in New York City and soon became an associate editor for the college's literary magazine the Echo. In addition to her editorial duties, she published translations of two French poems in the Echo--"Clair de Lune" (by Paul Verlaine) and "Odelette" (by Henri de Regnier) in the Christmas 1932 issue. …

Joy Davidman’s place in the canon of twentieth century American literature deserves more attention than it has heretofore received. For instance, in her role in the late 1930’s as poetry editor for New Masses (the weekly voice of the Communist Party of the United States of America), Davidman published poets such as Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, Alexander Bergman, and Aaron Kramer. At the same time, her poems in Letter to a Comrade (1938) touting a Communist agenda, while clearly written in the tradition of “proletarian literature,” are nonetheless well done; although a political agenda drives her selection of subject matter in these poems, they are not simply set pieces. She uses irony effectively and her imagery is evocative and striking. In fact, Davidman was very much a conscious craftswoman, spending the summers of 1938, 1940, 1941, and 1942 at the MacDowell Colony, a writers’ retreat in New Hampshire, where she honed her skills. For instance, her best piece of fiction, Anya (1940), is a direct result of her time at the colony. She understood the intellectual energy it takes to become an effective writer of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and she never backed away from hard work. Her commitment to writing—especially her voice, her rhetoric, her style, and the literary influences informing her work—merit more scholarly attention. In this essay I explore Davidman’s early devotion and commitment to the craft of writing; in addition, I evaluate the poems, fiction, and non-fiction she produced before she wrote for New Masses and published Letter to a Comrade.

It is an unfortunate fact that Ruth Pitter (1897-1992)--an important twentieth-century British poet who won the Hawthornden Prize in 1937 for A Trophy of Arms (1936), the William E. Heinemann Award for The Ermine (1953), and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1955--is little known in America. When her name is recognized, it is usually in the context of "the woman who should have married C. S. Lewis." (2) Yet Pitter is an accomplished poet, having produced eighteen volumes of new and collected verse in her lifetime. (3) Although it is too much to call this article an attempt to "rehabilitate" Pitter, it is accurate to describe it as an effort to expose how Pitter's poetic impulse, the desire "to express something of the secret meanings which haunt life and language" places her in the mainstream of twentieth-century British poetry. (4) Because she was never associated with a literary group or movement, she has not attracted widespread critical notice in spite of the many poets and writers who admired her work. (5) Pitter, in contrast to T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W. H. Auden, is a traditional poet in the line of George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, W. B. Yeats, and Philip Larkin. Unlike the modernists, she rarely experiments with meter or verse form, nor does she explore modernist themes or offer critiques of modern English society. Instead, she works with familiar meters and verse forms, and her reluctance to alter her voice to follow in the modernist line explains in part why critics have overlooked her poetry. She is not trendy, avant-garde, nor, thankfully, impenetrable. (6) As a result, for many years she labored at her craft "in comparative but wholly unjustified obscurity" (Schlueter). Moreover, when significant literary success came, contemporary critical recognition of her achievements was restrained. I believe the failure to bring a critical perspective to her life and work is a serious aesthetic, intellectual, and literary oversight. The intensity, passion, yet controlled insight about the human condition and her mystical reflections on the natural world merit sustained scholarly attention and broad exposure. However, of particular importance is her religious poetry because one can chart through it a pilgrimage of faith--a journey beginning with a conciliatory acquiescence to a veiled transcendence moving through acceptance of a distant, impersonal deity and ending with commitment to orthodox Christianity. This journey of faith is reflected in the mature poetry of Pitter, most of it written from 1935 to 1953, a period dominated by the growing threat of fascism and the very real worry that Western civilization was on the verge of destruction. The intent here is to offer a broad overview of Pitter's spiritual maturation through her religious poetry as well as an indication of her gifts as a poet. A Trophy of Arms Her first mature volume of poetry, A Trophy of Arms: Poems 1926-1935 (1936) is a collection of poems that explores the melancholic reality of the human condition; yet, at the same time, it is neither depressing nor despairing. Instead, it is a clarion call to embrace sorrow, loss, and loneliness through either the lens of nature or a veiled, transcendent power. Often, her poems focusing upon spiritual themes are vaguely hopeful. For instance, "Sudden Heaven" is a powerful affirmation of hope. Pitter combines a clipped, terse style with an incisive eye to create a poem of startling power about unexpected, unsolicited joy: All was as it had ever been-- The worn familiar book, The oak beyond the hawthorn seen, The misty woodland's look: The starling perched upon the tree With his long tress of straw-When suddenly heaven blazed on me, And suddenly I saw: Saw all as it would ever be, In bliss too great to tell; For ever safe, for ever free, All bright with miracle: Saw as in heaven the thorn arrayed, The tree beside the door; And I must die--but O my shade Shall dwell there evermore. …

The status of the literary corpus of C. S. Lewis's prose has largely been resolved. While Walter Hooper's latest project, the collected letters, (1) will undoubtedly produce a number of heretofore unpublished letters, it is doubtful that any "new" essays or works of fiction will appear, particularly given the controversy provoked by Hooper's publication of The Dark Tower (1977). (2) At the same time, the status of Lewis's unpublished poetry remains unresolved. (3) Specifically, in the preface to the 1986 reprint of Lewis's Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (1919), Hooper reviewed the initial publication history of this volume, Lewis's first published work. He did this primarily by drawing on Warren Lewis's notes in "The Lewis Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family, 1850-1930." Warren's careful assessment of the development of Spirits in Bondage includes reference to an early collection of poems titled "The Metrical Meditations of a Cod": It would be during this [Easter 1915] visit to Little Lea that Clive wrote the first poetry which he himself considered worthy of preservation so late as 1917. In the two years intervening between Easter 1915 and Easter 1917, he wrote fifty[-]two poems which he copied carefully into an old Malvern Upper Fifth Divinity note book, prefixing them with a chronological list of titles. The whole is entitled "The [M]etrical [M]editations of a Cod." ("LP" 4:306) (4) Hooper then noted that the "Metrical Meditations" were lost, perhaps, according to Warren, in a fire since "Jack himself burnt all documents therein transcribed [in "LP"], including his own diaries, in or soon after 1936" (xii). Accordingly, scholars of Lewis's poetry have assumed that the "Metrical Meditations" were destroyed. However, as I neared the end of research for C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Impulse of His Poetic Legacy, I came across a curious holograph notebook purported to be in the hand of Arthur Greeves, Lewis's lifelong friend to whom he had entrusted the "Metrical Meditations" at various times, particularly when Lewis was serving in France during World War I. (5) The title page of this notebook, "Early Poems," reads: "English Verses Made By--Clive Staples Lewis: --and Copied by His Friend--Joseph Arthur Greeves:--Belfast in the Year 1917." Fifty-two poems are listed in chronological order in the table of contents. (6) What caught my eye was the number fifty-two, since this is the identical number Warren refers to as having comprised "Metrical Meditations." I am now ready to argue that "Early Poems" is in fact a draft of the "lost" collection titled "Metrical Meditations." (7) This essay will review briefly the evidence for this contention, note the relationship between "Early Poems" (also, by association, "Metrical Meditations") and Spirits in Bondage, (8) and publish for the first time twenty-one heretofore unpublished poems found in "Early Poems." Lewis's letters indicate that Greeves was intimately involved in the development of his earliest lyrical poems. On 29 June 1915 Lewis wrote Greeves: "I am glad to hear that you are keeping up the 'illustrative' side of your art, and shall want you to do some for my lyric poems. You can begin a picture of my 'dream garden' where the 'West wind blows.' As directions I inform you it is 'girt about with mists,' and is in 'the shadowy country neither life nor sleep,' and is the home of 'faint dreams'" (CL 134). Undoubtedly Lewis was referring to passages in the heretofore unpublished poem "My Western Garden" that appears as the first poem in "Early Poems": I know a garden where the West-Winds blow; (9) Far hence it lies, and few there be that know, And few that tread the road that leads thereto. Its gladsome glades are girt about with mists, And o'er its sward a slumberous streamlet twists, Flowing like Lethe, soundless. [...] No chart will guide thee to that twilit land, Nor mariner hath reached that Ocean's strand, For space it knoweth not, nor Time's rough hand. …