With my translation of Purgatorio out in the world, I’m taking a little break this summer from my beloved but exhausting Dante. How? By joining an ultimate Frisbee league? By going to the beach? Well, yes, actually. But I’m also going to teach an online course on lyric poetry. It will be called “How to Read a Poem like C. S. Lewis and Fall in Love with Poetry,” offered through the House of Humane Letters. It’s open to anyone who has a desperate desire to think about lyric poetry on Mondays in July. I hope some of you will join me! It’s also for this reason that, if you see me on the beach, you’ll find me reading The Collected Poems of Yeats or Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetries or Lewis’s History of Sixteenth-Century Literature Excluding Drama. You know, beach lit.

I’ll include an influencer pic next time, but for now, this is my first attempt to sketch a roadmap of where this course will go:

In the last couple of pages of An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis can feel the impatience of his readers. By the time we get to the “Epilogue,” Lewis has spent most of the pages of the book talking about the nature of bad reading and bad readers, because once you know what is characteristic of a “bad reader” then you can say what a “literary reader” is, by way of contrast. Thence, you arrive at a working definition of literature: good literature is what the literary reader enjoys.

But Lewis knew this circuitous reasoning was maddening: “All this implies the conception of a specifically literary ‘good’ or ‘value.’ Some readers may complain that I have not made clear what good this is… Why do I not lay the cards on the table?” (130). Although Lewis thinks he’s not obligated to lay his cards on the table—he protests he’s just a humble practitioner of literature, not a philosopher of literature—he nevertheless agrees to tell us something on the subject:

A work of literary art can be considered in two lights… It is both Logos (something said) and Poiema (something made). As Logos it tells a story, or expresses an emotion, or exhorts or pleads... As Poiema, by its aural beauties and also by the balance and contrast and the unified multiplicity of its successive parts…

To enjoy the shape of a Poiema is something very different from enjoying the (literal) shape of a house or a vase. The parts of the Poiema are things we ourselves do; we entertain various imaginations, imagined feelings, and thoughts in an order, and at a tempo, prescribed by the poet. (One of the reasons why a very “exciting” story can hardly elicit the best reading is that greedy curiosity tempts us to take some passages more quickly than the author intends.) This is less like looking at a vase than like “doing exercises” under an expert’s direction or taking part in a choric dance invented by a good choreographer (Experiment, 132).

Readers of Lewis will recognize how similar this explanation is to what he had called “the logic of fairy tales” in his essay “On Stories”:

I happened to remark to a man who was sitting beside me at dinner the other night that I was reading Grimm in German of an evening but never bothered to look up a word I didn’t know, “so that it is often great fun” (I added) “guessing what it was that the old woman gave to the prince which he afterwards lost in the wood.”

“And specially difficult in a fairy-tale,” said he, “where everything is arbitrary and therefore the object might be anything at all.” His error was profound. The logic of a fairy-tale is as strict as that of a realistic novel, though different.

We have, then, Lewis’s first “secret” for reading literature well, which, for fun, I’m going to call The First Law Literature:

Since I’m preparing for my summer class, I’ll zoom in and focus on lyric poetry. Every time we read a poem, we don’t just ask, “what is it about” (ask after its logos), we ask “what does it feel like”; but we arrive at that only by asking how the poet uses the formal “nuts and bolts” of poetry to create an overall atmosphere, and that is what Lewis means by the “logic” of fairy tales. All of those little details stack up to create an “air” or “atmosphere” or, if you want, a “vibe.” And Lewis is a master at pulling out the formal details to help us taste, or even “smell” the fragrance of a poem.

You could ask: how rhetorical is the poem? Does the author love those schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric, like, say, Milton or Spenser, or detest them, like a contemporary poet, who prefers to cultivate a voice of “authenticity”?

What kind of lexicon does the poem employ: a high, aulic register, full of polysyllabic sesquipedelians (sorry: that’s the first time I’ve used that in print, I promise), or does the poet, like Wendell Berry, prefer the humble, lowly, and down-to-earth (as in “How to Be a Poet”)? Does the poem have a rhyme scheme? It is in meter? Is the poem arranged in stanzas (like Yeats’s “Among School Children,” in ottava rima: eight blocks of eight lines!) or free in form? But, always, most importantly, we ask: how do all these bits and pieces add up to create the “soundtrack” (the poiema) for the logos? (By the way, please do me a favor: don’t tell my classicist friend Lionel that I just translated poiema as “soundtrack.”)

But as important as The First Law of Literature is the way he makes his case. Within these final pages in Experiment, we find Lewis referring to John Donne’s Apparition, to Dante’s Comedy, to Housman and Chesterton, Fitzgerald, Kipling, Lucretius, Lawrence, Marlow, Carlyle, as well as wondering about “Thetis rising from the sea to comfort Achilles, Chaucer’s or Spenser’s Lady Nature, or the Mariner’s skeleton ship.” If we can, again, compare this passage with another, we can “derive” The Second Law of Literature.

The passage comes from “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism.” Part of Lewis’s argument is dedicated to critiquing the whole modern enterprise of biblical criticism, where Lewis has this to say:

[W]hatever these men may be as Biblical critics, I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack literary judgement, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the text they are reading. It sounds a strange charge to bring against men who have been steeped in those books all their lives. But that might be just the trouble. A man who has spent his youth and manhood in the minute study of New Testament texts and of other people’s studies of them, whose literary experiences of these texts lacks any standard of comparison such as can only grow from a wide and deep and genial experience of literature in general is, I should think, very likely to miss the obvious things about them. If he tells me that something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the flavor; not how many years he has spent on that Gospel.

Did you recognize the key word in the passage above? “Flavor,” a synonym in Lewis’s vocabulary for “atmosphere” or “air” or “poiema.” But here we have something new: although modern biblical scholars admire themselves because they are armed with a method which they consider up-to-date and scientific, Lewis thought he had a secret weapon they lacked: a lifetime of disparate reading! And if you’ve read his criticism then you’ve watched him—and, in this way, he’s like Northrop Frye—imaginatively range across every type of literature conceivable from Anglo-Saxon riddle poems, to medieval romance, ancient epics, Romantic tales, modern realist novels, and contemporary science fiction. And this breadth of literary experience helps him read with depth, because anytime that he came upon a new literary text, he could always ask, as opposed to what?

This, then, is The Second Law of Literature:

In other words, an author or an age’s idiosyncratic tendencies could stand out in relief, in comparison to how other ages felt and wrote. Because Lewis had this huge internal database, though, he could measure literary authors over against countless others: did they use high words or low words; did they choose long and ornate sentences, or short and choppy ones; did they choose, almost like scientists or painters of realist portraits, to explain how people felt and what they did and what they ate and how much it cost, or did they let supernatural forces enter into the plot (Macbeth or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). What kind of metaphors do they like? What kind of forms are typical of the age?

Sometimes, we get lucky, because the poem is set directly in dialogue with another poem. For instance, T. S. Eliot, at the beginning of his “Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” quotes directly, in Italian, from Dante’s Inferno 27, the canto in which Dante has a conversation with the damned soul of Guido da Montefeltro, a false counselor. In contrast to Guido, Prufrock is not a magnanimous or accomplished man. On the contrary, he leads a completely forgettable life. And so, we wonder, in what sense is this modern, well-off but very ordinary bureaucrat making a confession from hell? There are other examples, like what happens when Yeats translates Ronsard’s poem on old age, or how Hopkins 'in “God’s Grandeur” responds to Wordsworth’s “The World is too much with us.”

Of course, even if a particular poem is not in direct dialogue with another poem, asking, what does this poem do, as opposed to another poem, is still valuable.

In this way, Law #2 helps us with Law #1, and, thus, we shouldn’t be overwhelmed or discouraged by how thick the Norton Anthology of Poetry is. The sheer number and types of lyric poems will not discourage us, because the fact that lyric poetry has been written—and, indeed, sung—from the days of ancient Greece (Sappho and Pindar) through the Roman Republic and Empire (Horace) through the Middle Ages (Dante and Petrarch) into the Renaissance, through the Romantic period and into our own day is a huge advantage to us. Rather than feeling the lyric tradition as overwhelming, we’ll be grateful for this huge range of poems created within different cultures and languages because it provides a breadth that helps with depth.

In my course, I’m going to use the thought of C. S. Lewis to explain these “Laws,” but I’m also going to illustrate them with lots of lyric poems, ranging from antiquity to our own lifetime. In this way, I’m hoping to reconstruct something like what you could have learned in Lewis’s own classroom.

Hmm. Perhaps that’s too ambitious.

At least, I’m hoping to create a class that could enable us to have the tools and background needed for us to follow Professor Lewis’s lectures with due subtlety.