【英文原著类】SPIRITS IN BONDAGE A CYCLE OF LYRICS(被缚的精神).pdf

SPIRITS IN BONDAGE A CYCLE OF LYRICS
SPIRITS IN BONDAGE
A CYCLE OF LYRICS
By Clive Hamilton
"The land where I shall never be The love that I shall never see"
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SPIRITS IN BONDAGE A CYCLE OF LYRICS
Historical Background
Published under the pseudonym, Clive Hamilton, Spirits in Bondage
was C. S. Lewis' first book. Released in 1919 by Heinemann, it was
reprinted in 1984 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and included in Lewis'
1994 Collected Poems. It is the first of Lewis' major published works to
enter the public domain in the United States. Readers should be aware that
in other countries it may still be under copyright protection.
Most of the poems appear to have been written between 1915 and
1918, a period during which Lewis was a student under W. T. Kirkpatrick,
a military trainee at Oxford, and a soldier serving in the trenches of World
War I. Their outlook varies from Romantic expressions of love for the
beauty and simplicity of nature to cynical statements about the presence of
evil in this world. In a September 12, 1918 letter to his friend Arthur
Greeves, Lewis said that his book was, "mainly strung around the idea that
I mentioned to you before--that nature is wholly diabolical & malevolent
and that God, if he exists, is outside of and in opposition to the cosmic
arrangements." In his cynical poems, Lewis is dealing with the same
questions about evil in nature that Alfred Lord Tennyson explored from a
position of troubled faith in "In Memoriam A. H." (Stanzas 54f). In a letter
written perhaps to reassure his father, Lewis claimed, "You know who the
God I blaspheme is and that it is not the God that you or I worship, or any
other Christian."
Whatever Lewis believed at that time, the attitude in many of these
poems is quite different from the attitude he expressed in his many
Christian books from the 1930s on. Attempts in movies and on stage plays
to portray Lewis as a sheltered professor who knew little about pain until
the