“I am not arguing that [Edmund] Spenser was not a Calvinist. A priori it is very likely that he was. But his poetry is not so written as to enable us to pick out his own beliefs in distinct separation from kindred beliefs. When a modern writer is didactic he endeavours, like Shaw or M. …
The Puritan and Nature
“The Romantic poet wishes to be absorbed into Nature, the Elizabethan, to absorb her” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century, p. 341).
Medieval and Protestant
“In that way the Arcadia is a kind of touchstone. What a man thinks of it, far more than what he thinks of Shakespeare or Spenser or Donne, tests the depth of his sympathy with the sixteenth century . . . It gathers up what a whole generation wanted to say. The very gallimaufry that …
A Dazzling Figure
“Even at this distance Sidney is dazzling. He is that rare thing, the aristocrat in whom the aristocratic ideal is really embodied . . . poet and patron of poets, statesman, knight, captain — fate has dealt such hands before, but they have very seldom been so well played” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the …
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 …
Puritan Greatness With Words
“But on almost any view, Tyndale who inaugurated, and the Genevan translators who first seriously advance, our tradition, tower head and shoulders above all others whom I have yet mentioned” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century, p. 211).
The Low Bottom of the Heart
“Where Tyndale is most continuously and obviously superior to More is in style. He is, beyond comparison, lighter, swifter, more economical . . . What we miss in Tyndale is the many-sidedness, the elbow-room of More’s mind; what we miss in More is the joyous, lyric quality of Tyndale. The sentences that stick to the …
He Is No Patcher
“The law requires not only that we should do thus and thus but that we should do it with ‘a free, a willing, a lusty, and a louing hart’. Its beginning and end is that we should love God and our neighbours. It demands of us not only acts but new motives. This is what …
The Puritan Heart Set Free
“In theological language, no man can be saved by works. The whole purpose of the ‘gospel’, for Tyndale, is to deliver us from morality. Thus, paradoxically, the ‘puritan’ of modern imagination — the cold, gloomy heart, doing as duty what happier and richer souls do without thinking of it — is precisely the enemy which …
Puritan Poetic Glory
“Historians whose sympathies are Roman attribute the catastrophe to the Reformation. But if the cause lies in that quarter at all it must be sought in some peculiarity of the Scotch Reformation; for in England the old religion had no such poetical glories to show and the new had many” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in …