He is best known by his criticism. I have learned much from it. -C. S. Lewis

Charles Williams (1886-1945), friend of T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis and admired by W. H. Auden, was a versatile man of letters. He wrote supernatural thrillers, plays, theology and journalism but he saw poetry and criticism as being his real work. This is a new collection of his literary essays, taken from books, pamphlets and periodicals long out of print. The title essay develops Williams’s theory of poetry but is also a covert homage to the woman who was is second and unacknowledged love. The essays have been edited by Stephen Barber, for many years Treasurer of the Charles Williams Society and author of several articles on the writer. This is the first collection of Williams’s literary essays for over fifty years.