Charles Williams on Poetry

 One of my all-time favourite figures in the literary world of the last century is Charles Williams. For some, for very few, he needs no introduction, but he has been obscured by his more famous friends, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Together, with other extraordinary people, notably Owen Barfield who died relatively recently, they formed a group called The Inklings in Oxford during the nineteen thirties and forties. These men met in each others' homes to discuss literary and philosophical matters, and read out their own work before publication. C.S. Lewis would read from his novels and religious and philosophical writings, Tolkien from the later-to-be-published The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. They would also meet up in an Oxford pub 'The Eagle and Child' (a wonderful place I recommend) over a few pints of the best English ale.

As for Charles Williams, the least formally 'educated' of the group, and from the most modest background, he worked for the Oxford University Press (at the time they would place the definite article in front of OUP) as editor, writer and critic. He was a singular and remarkable poet himself, and wrote a series of extraordinary novels, seven in total, which bring the supernatural into the everyday world of England. I would strongly recommend them, they were popular in their day, T.S. Eliot encouraged his writing, and they stand as a monument to a remarkable mind. They are: War in Heaven, Many Dimensions, The Place of the Lion, The Greater Trumps, Shadows of Ecstasy, Descent into Hell, and All Hallow's Eve. 

He wrote plays too, and books of literary criticism (for want of a better term; I prefer 'reflection'), and I recently found a first edition from 1932 which I am thoroughly enjoying. As with most of Williams' prose, it is curious in style, dense and challenging in its insights. This one is called The English Poetic Mind, in which he attempts to define, or at least touch upon, what characterises this phenomenon, looking in particular at Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Milton. I have scanned below a section from the opening, "What makes great poetry', in which he quotes Wordsworth's insights into poetic creation. For the Romantic poet, it needs 1) 'the vital soul' 2) 'general truths' 3) 'external things - Forms, images'. Williams expands upon this, by saying that the great poets 'arouse in us an actual sense of our own faculties' for such things as heroism, love, exile, although these things may be alien to or limited in us. This makes me think of the poem 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' by the War Poet Wilfred Owen, which we have been looking at in class recently. We could not possibly understand the terrible experience of trench warfare ourselves, but the poem awakens in us a deep sympathy, and at least shades of understanding, however distant, and in some sense we are connected to the young men who suffered and died during this conflict. 

Below you will find the link to the extract from Williams' book:

"A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf - broadcast on BBC Radio 4

The HK class have been writing a commentary on Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. This morning while listening to BBC Radio 4 over breakfast, I heard they are going to be broadcasting a dramatisation of her major work, A Room of One's Own. Interestingly, it was recorded during lockdown with actors and production team all in rooms of their own. It should be very good.

Virginia Woolf's funny, provoking and insightful feminist text on female creativity dramatised for radio by Linda Marshall Griffiths.

Part of Electric Decade: classic titles that influenced and characterised the 1920's.

It is 1928, a woman is asked to talk of women and writing. In the university town of 'Oxbridge' she is refused entry to the gardens and library and discovers the poverty of the one female college there. She searches the British Museum library for proof that women even existed in history.

You will find the link below to click on and listen. It will be available shortly after broadcast tomorrow 31st May:

'Women in Love'

D.H. Lawrence is one of the great artists of the industrial age. In his writing his characters feel the urge to question the life-denying mechanised forces at work at the beginning of the twentieth century, where we still are, and enjoy a new-found freedom in communion with the deepest human instincts, and the natural world. He will give us characters who are on the edge of something bigger than themselves, far beyond the petty defining notions of modern society, something they don't understand but which disturbs, and draws them on.

In Women in Love (1920), two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, venture out into a colliery town and see the working class world of coal dust, hard labour and poverty. Although amused and detached in their superior middle class ways, we can sense their greater malaise regarding themselves; Ursula cursing her familiar home surroundings, as she is drawn to the streets of the industrial coal-mining Midlands. There is a dark beauty in the description of these ‘ugly’ surroundings : ‘hills with cornfields and woods, all blackened with distance, as if seen through a veil of crape. White and black smoke rose up in steady columns, magic within the dark air’.

The young women appear to be more imprisoned in themselves and their petty judgements than the more natural folk around them : ‘No one thought to be ashamed. No one was ashamed of it all’. It makes Gudrun think. Although she sounds detached in her amused observations about everything being ‘a ghoulish replica of the real world...’, the experience brings home to her the restricted narrow life she leads. Being out here is like a ‘violation of a dark, uncreated, hostile world’, leading her to ask, ‘then what was her own world, outside?’ Her own clothes feel out of place, artificial, like a thick suit of armour separating her from a greater reality she has always shut out, the gritty world of working people :’She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-green velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour.’

As the sisters move out of and beyond the colliery town into the countryside round about, Lawrence paints a striking picture of the gradual fading of industrial dirt and pollution, ‘Still the faint glamour of blackness persisted over the fields and wooded hills...’, followed by complete freedom, from both middle class and industrial constriction, the glorious inimitable Lawrentian description of bushes and flowers bursting forth with life! Such delicacy of observation, as if he can feel the essence of the vital, natural life he describes. 

Here is the extract:

Charles Williams

Most people have heard of J.R.R.Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. They were part of a larger group in Oxford called The Inklings, and they all used to meet in one of their houses and discuss literature, and read out loud from their own writings. Exciting times indeed. Tolkien, Lewis, and an unfortunately lesser known member Charles Williams, decided each to invent a strange world of their own. Tolkien of course invented Middle Earth, Lewis Narnia, and Williams our world but with strange dimensions and odd happenings. He wrote seven remarkable novels, and in them you find adventure in ordinary tranquil English towns and villages where supernatural occurrences cause disturbance, even havoc. Here is the unusual opening paragraph of The Place of the Lion (1933), which takes place in the then sleepy southern pre-Brexit English county of Hertfordshire. It made me want to read on: