CS Lewis's strengths as a writer

CS Lewis's Strengths as a Writer

The Lewis deserve to be analyzed with some care because - contrary to what might have supported the same Lewis in his capacity as a literary critic - in the particular case of this writer can be found in his themed works: see for example mother's death occurred when Lewis was only 10 years or the complex intellectual development of young Lewis resulted in the conversion to Christianity. Lewis considered his biography worthy of interest to readers is demonstrated if anything the fact that he published an autobiography of his early years.

It is perhaps obvious that C. S. Lewis' popularity as a writer rest squarely on a prose style that is clear, lucid, and engaging. Lewis' attractive prose is not limited to one or two genres, but instead is apparent in his literary criticism as well as his children stories, in his devotional works as well as his science fiction, in his apologetics as well as his letters. It is a commonplace, then, to underscore the enormous success his prose brought him. Yet ironically Lewis began his publishing career as a poet with Spirits in Bondage (1919), a volume of interesting if youthful poems, and followed this with Dymer (1926), a long narrative poem in rhyme royal. In fact, throughout his life Lewis continued to write poetry; some poems were included in prose works like The Pilgrim's Regress, the Narnian series, and the space trilogy, and others were published independently in magazines, journals, and newspapers. Most of these poems were collected by Walter Hooper and published in 1964 as Poems (Michael, 2005).

Some of the details of Lewis's early life echo throughout the seven-volume work of The Chronicles of Narnia. For the first 9 years of his life, Lewis had a carefree and imagination-filled childhood. Lewis and his older brother invented a fictional land called Boxen and wrote many illustrated stories about it. He also spent a significant part of his childhood in a large house with many secret passages and plenty of attic space, a biographical detail that recalls both the games of Polly and Digory at the start of The Magician's Nephew, as well as the very concept of “traveling between worlds” around which The Chronicles are based.

Lewis was also a voracious reader in his youth (two of his favorites were Treasure Island and The Secret Garden), and he and his brother spent many rainy days telling adventure stories inside an old wardrobe. In The Chronicles, an old wardrobe becomes the magical means for travel to the land of Narnia. When he was 9 years old, Lewis's mother died after a long and difficult illness. Lewis was sent to a boarding school a few weeks after her death. Even this detail has poignant resonance with the ending of The Magician's Nephew, as the character Digory is able to heal his ailing mother with magical assistance from the land of Narnia.The happy fact of C. S. Lewis's creation of long fictional works is that the ...