The Chronicles of C. S. Lewis Lead to Poets’ Corner

By STEVEN ERLANGER | International New York Times | November 20, 2013

The Narnia chronicles are published by HarperCollins Children’s Books. “They are the jewel in the crown for us,” said Susan Katz, the publisher. Schoolchildren continue to read the series, especially those 8 to 12. 

Toni Markiet, the Narnia editor, said: “The books are over 60 years old, but they still work because they’re still about the struggle between good and evil. Children understand that concept very well. And the books are about friendship, loyalty and compassion. They have humor. Lewis would say if a book is good for you to read at 5, it’s good at 50.”

LONDON — C. S. Lewis was a noted polymath: philosopher, theologian, professor, novelist, children’s writer, literary critic, lecturer. But he was not much of a poet. 

Still, 50 years to the day after his death, Clive Staples Lewis, known to his friends and family as Jack, will be among the more than 100 people commemorated in some fashion in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner, alongside figures like Geoffrey Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, the Brontë sisters, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Keats, John Milton and Ted Hughes. 

Lewis, who died at a week before his 65th birthday, on Nov. 22, 1963 — the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated — will receive the honor of a memorial stone in the floor in the Poets’ Corner, a portion of the abbey’s south transept that contains graves, memorial stones and a memorial window. 

His stepson Douglas Gresham sees the amusing side of this. “Jack has been revered in the Christian world for some time now, so the abbey is good,” he said. “The ironic part, though he mastered several genres, is that he’ll be memorialized in Poets’ Corner, but that’s one field in which he didn’t succeed very well.” 

Lewis remains read and profitably published in various worlds, most prominently in religious texts and in his children’s fantasy novels about Narnia. 

Over 100 million copies of the Narnia books have been sold in more than 40 languages, said Mr. Gresham, 68, and the three films based on the books have grossed $1.6 billion, with a fourth commissioned. “Not too shabby,” he said. 

Mr. Gresham became a cleric and ran a ministry in Ireland for many years before moving to Malta, where he farms, broadcasts and manages the C. S. Lewis empire. He is sensitive about the continuing and sizable proceeds of the Lewis estate and said that journalists always ask him how he spends the money. “I tell them it’s really none of their business,” he said. 

The anniversary of Lewis’s death and the commemoration at Westminster has prompted renewed interest in him. The memorial stone’s unveiling will cap a two-day conference, with lectures on his Christian apologetics and his literary work, choral evensong, a panel discussion and, on Friday, a service of Thanksgiving preached by the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and the signing of a newly commissioned anthem with the words of his poem, “Love’s as Warm as Tears.” 

Websites devoted to him — cslewis.com and narnia.com — will have quotations from fans around the world. 

Lewis, an admirer of William Butler Yeats, wanted desperately to succeed as a poet. He published his first volume of verse, “Spirits in Bondage,” in 1919 under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton, from his mother’s maiden name. At 19, he fought in the Battle of the Somme. The poems were largely written in the trenches and evinced the early atheism he left behind. His second volume of poetry, “Dymer,” published in 1926 also under the name Clive Hamilton, was largely ignored. 

In a 1995 essay in Seven: An Anglo- American Literary Review, Don W. King of Montreat College gives a generous view of the Lewis output of poetry and cites Lewis’s own tongue-in-cheek “Confession” of 1954: 

I’m like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom
A primrose was a yellow primrose, one whose doom
Keeps him forever in the list of dunces,
Compelled to live on stock responses,
Making the poor best that I can
Of dull things ... peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran,
Silver weirs, new-cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem,
The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem.

 

In a 1922 diary entry, Lewis confided that “I have leaned much too much on the idea of being able to write poetry, and if this is a frost, I shall be rather stranded.” And although frustrated by the failure of his early ambitions to be a poet, he wrote verse from time to time. 

When poetry failed, he turned to writing about faith, producing “Mere Christianity.” The collection, in which he tried to explain the basics of his beliefs, was drawn from BBC Radio talks he gave during World War II. It continues to sell 250,000 copies a year and another 50,000 in audiobooks, making it annually one of the top 50 best-selling religious books, according to Mark Tauber, the publisher of HarperOne, which handles much of Lewis’s nonfiction. 

“He continues to endure,” Mr. Tauber said. “Evangelicals in the United States like to claim Lewis as their own, but we have Roman Catholics, Protestants and even Mormons who use his books, so he spans the spectrum of Christian approaches. Maybe he’s popular because he’s not part of any clear tribe.” 

The Narnia chronicles are published by HarperCollins Children’s Books. “They are the jewel in the crown for us,” said Susan Katz, the publisher. Schoolchildren continue to read the series, especially those 8 to 12. 

Toni Markiet, the Narnia editor, said: “The books are over 60 years old, but they still work because they’re still about the struggle between good and evil. Children understand that concept very well. And the books are about friendship, loyalty and compassion. They have humor. Lewis would say if a book is good for you to read at 5, it’s good at 50.”