Plain to the Inward Eye: Selected Essays on C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis scholar Don W. King has kept a critical eye on the work by and about Lewis for four decades. Now, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Lewis's death, King has put together a collection of his essays and critical reviews organized around four areas. The first deals mainly with what will perhaps be Lewis's longest lasting legacy-his Chronicles of Narnia. The second focuses on Lewis's poetry, a neglected area of his work. The third considers Lewis and the two women poets with whom he had lasting relationships: Ruth Pitter and Joy Davidman. The fourth offers a critical perspective on the way in which scholarly interest in Lewis has developed over the last thirty years. "I believe that Lewis's success as a writer," King writes, "springs from his deeply held belief about the core values of civilized life, what he terms ?stock responses.' Tracking these back to the Greek and Roman writers he so admired-Homer, Virgil, and Ovid-as well as the towering figures of western literature-Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Yeats-Lewis infuses his work with passages promoting honor, courage, bravery, honesty, charity, respect, and related values."