A fantastic find!

Given how many letters Lewis wrote to friends and fans (including to Glumpuddle's grandfather, if I'm not mistaken) it makes me wonder how many more writings of his are still waiting to be discovered. 

@the-mad-poet-himself Very true, regarding lost writings!

I was just re-reading the news article and realised that either there's a typo or someone at the Telegraph is not good with numbers. The opening line describes the poem as having been written "60 years ago", but further down we're told it dates from 1935. Ummm... by my count, that's 89 years ago...  

@courtenay Oh boy . What do they teach in these schools?

@the-mad-poet-himself Apparently not logic... or at least not basic numeracy.  

@courtenay 60 years ago was when Lewis died. Perhaps they've mixed their information. 

I wonder if the poem has been in hiding for a reason. As brilliant a writer as Lewis was, his poetry was something he did not hold in high regard, nor did critics if memory serves me. He was so unhappy with his poetry he gave it up from what I have read. Still, always interesting to see and find new things for this great man, I love how his mind perceived the world, few like him, if any!

(Edited to remove an unintentional duplicate post! ) 

I can hardly believe it — less than a month after the last one, there's been a discovery of even more previously unpublished poems by Lewis!!

'Loud-mouthed bully': CS Lewis satirised Oxford peer in secret poems

It appears Lewis so detested one of his lecturers, Henry Cecil Wyld, during his early years at Oxford that he took the opportunity of ridiculing him in verse — and in several languages, too — written in his own copy of Wyld's textbook on the history of English.

Now this poetry certainly doesn't show Lewis at his most charitable, and of course it dates from before he became a Christian; I'm guessing he wouldn't have considered this to be very proper behaviour after his conversion, and he might be embarrassed if he knew that about a century later, scholars and fans would be reading and discussing these private poetic jabs at a fellow academic. But on the other hand, he obviously kept the textbook, with all those poems he wrote in it, for the rest of his life, so...   And going by what's shared in the article, it's clear that young "Jack", even in his early 20s, had a great command of multiple languages, a brilliant way with words, and a really sharp sense of humour!

(As @wonderings pointed out, Lewis didn't hold his own poetry in high regard, and it's certainly not something he ever became well known for. I wonder if that's perhaps partly because he wasn't particularly good at the grandiose epic sorts of poetry, whereas (as this discovery shows) he had much more of a talent for witty and satirical verse, but that wasn't what he wanted the world to remember him by??) 

All right, NarniaWebbers, just to let you know — I'm off to Oxford next month to see the Lewis exhibition I mentioned earlier! (Here's the link again: C.S. Lewis: Words & Worlds)

The catch is that the exhibition — in Magdalen College Old Library — is only open on Wednesday afternoons, and I hardly ever have Wednesdays off work (and I don't like to make a special scheduling request just for this, although I know my boss would do her best to accommodate it if I asked!). However, I've just got my work schedule for the second half of July and it happens that I do, for once, have a Wednesday free, so...  

I'll be going down to Oxford by train — it's a 3-hour trip from where I live in Cheshire — and I've booked two nights at a small self-catering flat near the station, so it'll be a nice little adventure. I will visit the exhibition on Wednesday 17th July and will be sure to share my impressions here! And as I'll have the Tuesday afternoon and the whole of the Wednesday in Oxford, I'll have plenty of time to see and do other things as well. I have been to most of the Lewis-related sites in Oxford before (including his home, The Kilns, some years ago), but it's nearly 6 years since I last visited that wonderful little city and I'm really looking forward to exploring it again!

Just realised that it's nearly 4 months since I went to this exhibition and I completely forgot I was going to post about it here... possibly because it was a bit of a let-down. Very small and not many actual items on display — mainly just info about Lewis's life and works, with nothing significant that I didn't know already. There were a few interesting things, like his pen and a few of his letters and a handful of original illustrations by Pauline Baynes, but nothing that was genuinely worth going all that way for, which was quite disappointing. Nice to be in Oxford again, though.