Three
very different people — C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and T. S. Eliot — all thought that Charles Williams was the most genuinely good person that they had ever met. Eliot for example wrote: “He seemed to me to approximate, more nearly than any man I have known familiarly, to the saint.” On the other side, it has to be noted that he had a troubled marriage and, like Eliot, a “Beatrice” figure in his life.
Seventy years ago, the works of Williams, with their strong Christian themes, were widely appreciated. Today, he is little known, though an excellent Wikipedia article on him indicates the extraordinary range of his writings and the influence that he had not only on Eliot and Lewis, but on Dorothy Sayers and Dante studies more generally — all this while he had a full-time job at the Oxford University Press.
Stephen Barber however, has remained a big fan not only of his novels, but also of his much more difficult poetry. In this book, he assembles writings of his own on Williams, of varying length and purpose….
Book review: Richard Harries reflects on lesser-known work of a spiritual influencerhttps://t.co/HBvAOS57BX
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