The Inklings of Oxford by Harry Lee Poe

Author:Harry Lee Poe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Zondervan Academic

Above: The cloisters of New College Following page: New College chapel viewed from the cloisters

A series of carved angels ornament the beamed roof of New College chapel.

New College chapel

THE INFLUENCE OF CHARLES WILLIAMS

In coming to Oxford, Charles Williams brought with him a different world of experience from the cosmopolitan city of London, where he had lived and worked for so many years. Likewise, Lord David Cecil had traveled in different kinds of circles all his life. Both of them shared an appreciation for someone whom Jack Lewis deplored: T. S. Eliot. Lewis blamed Eliot for destroying poetry with the publication of “The Wasteland.” Traditional forms of poetry that had prevailed since time immemorial came crashing down. Eliot changed the fashion of poetry at a time when Lewis had the ambition to become a great poet. “The Wasteland” dashed Lewis’s hopes, and poetry receded into the background as Lewis realized he could not compete in the strange new world of modern poetry. Eliot, however, was a great admirer of the novels of Charles Williams. Lady Ottoline Morrell, the great literary hostess of London, invited both men to one of her famous teas for the purpose of their introduction. Lord David Cecil belonged to this same set. They would never become close friends, but their mutual respect only grew as Eliot became the editor of Williams’ books published by Faber and Faber, where Eliot worked. Williams could not be enthusiastic about Eliot’s poetry because of its lack of objective meaning that could be understood by a reader, but he appreciated Eliot nonetheless. Eliot and Williams had other points of disagreement, notably their views on Milton.

When Charles Williams came to Oxford, Milton’s Paradise Lost had been out of favor for years. No one on the English faculty lectured on it. At the same time, Lewis wanted to do something for Williams to make him more a part of the university. Though Williams had not completed a degree in his formal education, Lewis managed to smuggle him onto the lecture list due to the shortage of teachers during the war. Williams chose to lecture on Milton and refute more than a century of prejudice and ignorance about Paradise Lost. Lewis pronounced the lectures a roaring success, so much so that Lewis decided that he would take on Milton himself. The result of this resolution came in the form of the Ballard Matthews Lectures delivered at University College in North Wales in 1941 on Paradise Lost, which Lewis published in 1942 as A Preface to Paradise Lost.

If Williams influenced Lewis to pursue scholarly work on Paradise Lost, that influence began to multiply as Lewis’s imagination interacted with his research. In A Preface to Paradise Lost, Lewis made the observation that Satan hates to be ridiculed or laughed at and that Milton knew that Satan really was “an ass.” During a particularly boring sermon one Sunday morning at Holy Trinity Church in Headington, while Warnie was still on active duty, Lewis began turning over in his

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