C.S. Lewis, Poetry, and the Great War 1914-1918

This book presents a realistic and unromantic account of the early years of C.S. Lewis as revealed in ‘Spirits in Bondage’ and its surrounding events. It calls for a re-appraisal of Lewis himself, not as a ‘soldier-poet’ but as a young, ruthless and ambitious would-be academic, using others—his father, his university, his mistress—to further his own ends. It throws into stark relief his later conversion.