"Dating 'Sweet Desire'" -- Published by ETC

It's official: my article revealing the first religious poem C.S. Lewis ever wrote, "Sweet Desire," is now published by English Text Construction. Here's the link: "Dating 'Sweet Desire': C. S. Lewis’s Education in Alliterative Poetics."

I've already blogged about my core argument here, but here's the gist:
....a short poem, "Sweet Desire," that scholars have never previously paid any attention to. This poem is firmly datable to early 1930, probably January or February is my guess, and given the poem's subject matter, it's clearly talking about CSL's fears and intellectual trepidation about becoming a theist and abandoning atheism for good. It's basically Lewis's version of Caedmon's Hymn.

For metrical geeks, however, the article's most compelling points will involve how one poet progressed in terms of his skill in writing Old English-style poetry. For anyone familiar with the alliterative meter, some parts of that meter are definitely harder to reproduce than others, and Lewis gives us an excellent case study of the learning curve required by this difficult meter.

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