Published under the pseudonym, Clive Hamilton, Spirits in Bondagewas C. S. Lewis' first book. Released in 1919 by Heinemann, it
was reprinted in 1984 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and included
in Lewis' 1994 Collected Poems.
Most of the poems appear to have been written between 1915 and
1918, a period during which Lewis was a student under W. T.
Kirkpatrick, a military trainee at Oxford, and a soldier serving
in the trenches of World War I. Their outlook varies from Romantic
expressions of love for the beauty and simplicity of nature to
cynical statements about the presence of evil in this world. In
a September 12, 1918 letter to his friend Arthur Greeves, Lewis
said that his book was, "mainly strung around the idea that I
mentioned to you before--that nature is wholly diabolical &
malevolent and that God, if he exists, is outside of and in
opposition to the cosmic arrangements." In his cynical poems,
Lewis is dealing with the same questions about evil in nature
that Alfred Lord Tennyson...
