E.M.W. Tillyard: A Catalyst for Lewis’s 'Preface'

Article Sidebar

Open / Download PDF
Published: Dec 12, 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.47743/lincu-2019-2-0153
Keywords:
C.S. Lewis E. M. W. Tillyard John Milton poetry preface Paradise Lost debate

Main Article Content

Christine Murphy
Azusa Pacific University, California, U.S.A.

Abstract

When C.S. Lewis read E. M. W. Tillyard’s book Milton (1930), he engaged with the text through markings and annotations, particularly in the inside cover of the book. In this book, Lewis wrote an extended paragraph in direct response to Tillyard’s claim that it is necessary to understand the state of mind of a poet in order to analyze his or her work. Lewis’ notes focus on John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) and bear immense similarity to the themes found in his work A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942). When Lewis and Tillyard debated various aspects of poetry in the 1930s, their articles were collected and published together as The Personal Heresy (1939). Due to the notes found in Lewis’ personal copy of Milton, the claims made in the articles, and the striking similarities seen in Preface, Tillyard’s impact on Lewis cannot be ignored and he must be viewed as a direct influence for Lewis’ Preface.

Article Details

How to Cite
Murphy, C. “E.M.W. Tillyard: A Catalyst for Lewis’s ’Preface’”. Linguaculture, vol. 10, no. 2, Dec. 2019, pp. 171-8, doi:10.47743/lincu-2019-2-0153.
Issue
Vol. 10 No. 2 (2019)
Section
Articles
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Christine Murphy, Azusa Pacific University, California, U.S.A.

Christine Murphy graduated from Azusa Pacific University in 2018 with Bachelor degrees in English Literature, Honors Humanities, and Business Management. She will be attending graduate school in the U.K. with hopes of becoming a professor of English Literature in the future. Her research focuses on the negative influences of C.S. Lewis and she has worked to help analyze unpublished annotations Lewis made in his personal copy of books by Charles
Williams, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and E.M.W. Tillyard. She has presented her research in the United States and Romania and is currently working on a book-length project regarding the influence of E.M.W. Tillyard on C.S. Lewis’s work A Preface to Paradise Lost.

References

Glyer, Diana Pavlac. The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2006. Print.

Hardy, Elizabeth Baird. Milton, Spenser, and The Chronicles of Narnia: Literary Sources for the C.S. Lewis Novels. McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2007. Print.

Kort, Wesley A. Reading C.S. Lewis: A Commentary. Oxford University Press, 2016. Print.

Lewis, Clive Staples. Annotations made in Milton. N.d. © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd. Unpublished material. Print.

---. A Preface to Paradise Lost. Oxford University Press, 1961. Print.

Martin, Thomas L. Reading the Classics with C.S. Lewis. Baker Academic, 2000. Print.

McGrath, Alister. C.S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2013. Print.

Samuel, Irene. Dante and Milton: The Commedia and Paradise Lost. Cornell University Press, 1966. Print.

Schwartz, Sanford. “Reconstructing Eden: Paradise Lost and C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra” in Milton in Popular Culture. Ed. by Laura Lunger Knoppers and Gregory M. Colón Semenza. Palgrave MacMillan, 2006. Print.

Tillyard, E.M.W. Milton. Chatto and Windus, 1930. Print.

---. and C.S. Lewis The Personal Heresy: A Controversy. Ed. by Joel Heck. Concordia University Press, 2008. Print.

Williams, Rowan. “Rhetoric, Doctrine, and the Ethics of Language: C.S. Lewis on Paradise Lost”. C.S. Lewis: At Poets’ Corner. Ed. by Michael Ward and Peter S. Williams. Cascade Books, 2016. Print.

Wilson, A.N. C.S. Lewis: A Biography. W. W. Norton & Company, 1990. Print.