Although C. S. Lewis is best known for his prose and for his clear, lucid literary criticism, Christian apologetics, and imaginative Ransom and Narnia stories, he considered himself a poet for the first two and a half decades of his life. Owen Barfield recalls that anyone who met Lewis as a young man in the early 1920s at Oxford University quickly learned he was one 'whose ruling passion was to become a great poet. At that time if you thought of Lewis you automatically thought of poetry.' The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis offers readers, for the first time, a one-volume collection of Lewis's poetry, including many poems that have never appeared in print. With the poems arranged in chronological order, this volume allows readers the opportunity to compare the poetry Lewis was writing while he was also writing his fiction and nonfiction prose. Beginning with his earliest lyric poems from 1907, The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis follows Lewis's efforts to write long, narrative poems,
