The Puritan Defense of Poesy

“The defence of poetry will not be rightly understood unless we keep two facts carefully in mind. In the first place, it is a defence not of poetry as against prose but of fiction as against fact. The word poetry often covered all imaginative writing whether in prose or verse, and even those critics who did not so extend it thought of poetry primarily as invention. What is in question is not man’s right to sing but his right to feign, to ‘make things up’. In the second place, the attack which necessitates this defence is not, save locally and accidentally, a puritan attack. In England, no doubt, most of the attackers were Protestants. But so were most of the defenders. The controversy had begun far from England and long before the Reformation” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century, p. 318).