"Mr. Eliot's Achievement": C.S. Lewis's Critical Engagements with T.S. Eliot and the "Eliotics" (1933-1954)

Abstract

The character of C.S. Lewis’s critical engagements with T.S. Eliot’s poetry and criticism has been the subject of increasing controversy in recent years – controversy which suggests the need for a more complete study of their context and significance. This thesis therefore places them in the context of Lewis’s literary-critical and scholarly career, and its development over time.

In my first section, I consider Lewis’s engagements with Eliot in the context of literary scholarship of the 1930s and 1940s. I draw on Lewis’s letters, manuscripts, and other archival material to investigate their development over time.

In my second section, I consider Lewis’s creative engagements with Eliot in Perelandra (1942) and The Silver Chair (1953). Identifying intertextual connections between these novels and Eliot’s poetry offers a way of reading them as a continuation, by other means, of the complex and multi-faceted engagements with Eliot that so dominate Lewis’s academic work of the 1930s and 1940s.

Throughout his literary career – in his role as both scholar and writer of fiction – Lewis engaged with Eliot’s poetry and criticism as an important foil against which to define his own approach to literature. Understanding these engagements, then, is a crucial way in to situating Lewis in his literary-historical context, and of clarifying some of his response to the ideas that he encountered in his working life as a literary critic and scholar.