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Seminars

"Poets and Poetry: C. S. Lewis, Joy Gresham, and Ruth Pitter"
Week I : July 3-9;                               Week II : July 11-17
Directed by Dr. Don King

In this seminar, participants will explore the central role poetry played in the imaginative life of C. S. Lewis. Of special note is the fact that his first two published works, Spirits in Bondage (1919) and Dymer (1926), were volumes of poetry. Indeed, Owen Barfield said that when he first met Lewis in the early 1920’s, Lewis’ “ruling ambition was to become a great poet. At that time if you thought of Lewis you automatically thought of poetry.” In fact, Lewis regularly wrote and published poetry throughout his life. In addition to exploring his early poetry—much of it written before his conversion to Christ—participants will also read and discuss his mature poetry, all with an eye toward discovering how Lewis’ desire to be a poet was best realized in his fiction and non-fiction.

Supplementing this exposure to Lewis’ poetry, participants will also be invited to examine the important connections between Lewis and two other poets: Joy Gresham and Ruth Pitter. Joy, of course, eventually became Lewis’ wife, yet few people realize that she was a gifted poet; in fact, her volume of verse, Letters to a Comrade, was so good, she was the 1938 co-winner with Robert Frost of the Loines Memorial Award for poetry given by the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Ruth Pitter was a popular poet in Britain from the 1930’s through the 1970’s, who also served as Lewis’ mentor as a poet. Early on in their correspondence he wrote her: “I meant to send you, [some of my poems] but I shan’t. It all sounds like a brass band after yours. . . Why wasn’t I told you were as good as this?” In looking at the poetry of Gresham and Pitter, as well as Lewis’ correspondence with the latter, participants will gain a deeper appreciation for the role of both poetry and these two special friends in the life of Lewis.

Texts will include Lewis’ Poems and Narrative Poems, Pitter’s Collected Poems, and photocopies of selected poems by Joy. Professor King's C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse (Kent State UP, 2001) is recommended as an optional text.

On the faculty of Montreat College since 1974, Seminar Director Don W. King is Professor of English and also serves as Editor of the Christian Scholar’s Review. In addition to teaching courses on Lewis in a number of different venues, King has published articles on Lewis in The Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal, Christianity and Literature, CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, Christian Scholar’s Review, The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society, Mythlore, SEVEN, and Studies in the Literary Imagination. He contributed over sixty entries on Lewis’ poetry to The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia (Zondervan, 1998), and he is author of C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse (Kent State University Press, 2001). His current research projects include two books on British poet Ruth Pitter: Silent Music: The Letters of Ruth Pitter and Hunting the Unicorn: A Critical Biography of Ruth Pitter.

“C. S. Lewis and the Integrated Life: Critic, Apologist, Mythmaker”
Week III : July 24-30                      Week IV : Aug. 1-7
Directed by Dr. Bruce Edwards

Owen Barfield once said there were three C. S. Lewises: the literary critic; the Christian broadcaster and apologist; and the science-fiction and fantasy writer. What was most remarkable about him, Barfield suggested, was the keen integration of his life and thought; as he put it, "Somehow what Lewis thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything."

The consistency, kenn insight, and integrity Lewis’ life and thought as a Christian fantasist, theologian, and critic continue to inform and challenge 21st Century thinkers and pilgrims. This seminar is designed to examine how each of Lewis’ three vocations contributed to his impact as a public intellectual—and to pursue with vigor the profound Christian worldview he inhabited and bequeathed to those with the courage to follow in his steps. Together, the seminar will explore answers to these questions:

Participants will take a close look at the historical contexts that illuminate Lewis’ achievements and survey key works representative of each of his three vocations: literary critic, Christian apologist, and mythmaker. There will be special emphasis on certain often negleted but seminal texts that offer the greatest insight into Lewis’ patterns of thought, among them: The Abolition of Man, Till We Have Faces, and An Experiment in Criticism. The week-long seminar is creatively organized around ten verbs that capture the essence of Lewis’ commitments and contributions to our understanding of our world, and the world to come:

(1) Encounter; (2) Analogize; (3) Contextualize; (4) Analyze; (5) Synthesize; (6) Extrapolate; (7) Resist; (8) Refute; (9) Deepen; (10) Magnify

Seminar Director, Dr. Bruce L. Edwards, is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Distance Education and International Programs at Bowling Green State University (Ohio). He has been teaching and lecturing on the works of
C. S. Lewis in undergraduate and graduate seminars, summer workshops, church retreats, and scholarly forums for more than 25 years, and has lectured on Lewis on four continents. He is the author of A Rhetoric of Reading: C. S. Lewis’s Defense of Western Literacy, the editor of The Taste of the Pineapple: C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer, and he has contributed more than 30 scholarly essays and entries to various international publications and periodicals on Lewis and the Inklings during his career.

Space Limited to 8 participants per Seminar Week - Call today!
1-888- CSLEWIS (275-3947)

Registration
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