He uses his extensive scholarship with a delightful light touch, and teaches a considerable amount about the background, the form and content of the work in a very lucid and helpful style. This study of “Paradise Lost” was a delight to read. I enjoy Lewis' work whether it be fiction, essays, religious matters, even some of his poetry, but he is undoubtedly at his best in his professional capacity, writing as a professor on his subject of medieval and renaissance literature.

Meanwhile-until that recovery is made-such poetry as Milton's is more than ever necessary to us.' We need most urgently to recover the lost poetic art of enriching a response without making it eccentric, and of being normal without being vulgar. While the moderns have been pressing forward to conquer new territories of consciousness, the old territory, in which alone a man can live, has been left unguarded, and we are in danger of finding the enemy in our rear. Since poetry has abandoned that office the world has not bettered. Once again, the old critics were quite right when they said that poetry 'instructed by delighting,' for poetry was formerly one of the chief means whereby each new generation learned, not to copy, but by copying to make, the good Stock responses. 'The older poetry, by continually insisting on certain Stock themes-as that love is sweet, death bitter, virtue lovely, and children or gardens delightful-was performing a service not only of moral and civil, but even of biological, importance. His defense of Milton's Style had this fine gem, worth quoting at length: Lewis traces the expectations behind Paradise Lost by looking at Homer and Virgil and Beowulf. Don't let the title fool you! It's about way more than Paradise Lost.

Bareface cs lewis