The first collection of Williams’s literary essays for over fifty years
Charles Williams was the ‘third Inkling’, friend of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. His work was also admired by T. S. Eliot, Dorothy L. Sayers and W. H Auden among others. These essays have been gathered from books, pamphlets and periodicals all long out of print and none of them has previously been collected. They cover nearly all his literary interests and the final one shows his sympathy for left-wing political ideas arising from his own poverty-ridden childhood. The title essay develops Williams’s theory of poetry but is also a covert homage to the woman who was his second and unacknowledged love.

“As interest in Charles Williams as critic and poet continues to grow, the publication of these essays is a landmark. They will contribute very significantly to the current positive reassessment of so much of his writing on literary questions, and should be enthusiastically welcomed.”
Rowan Williams
former Archbishop of Canterbury and President of the Charles Williams Society

Contents
The Offce of Criticism
The Celian Moment
The Story of the Aeneid
Religion and Love in Dante: the Theology of Romantic Love
Shakespeare’s Henry V
On the Poetry of The Duchess of Mal
The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Staring at Miracle: A Vision by W. B. Yeats
Four Quartets: A Dialogue on Mr Eliot’s Poem
Ourselves and the Revolution