C.S. Lewis’s Modernist Moment: Taking up the Gauntlet in “Poem for Psychoanalysts and/or Theologians”

Abstract: C.S. Lewis’s poetry has always been understudied, and one reason has been his perceived traditionalism and animus against literary modernism. “Poem for Psychoanalysts and/ or Theologians,” however, is one of Lewis’s rare texts that exemplify his “modernist moment.” That is to say, this text contains a formal ambiguity unusual for Lewis, one that supports two equally valid (but mutually incompatible) interpretations of primal human experience, one psychoanalytic, the other theological. This interpretation requires that we separate “Poem” from the version he published as “The World is Round” in 1940. Yet the reason Lewis sought to employ modernist techniques of ambiguity in the first place is because he wished to articulate his own long history wrestling with psychoanalytic thought, both on an intellectual and a personal level. Read in this light, “Poem” becomes one of Lewis’s most formally nuanced and thematically ambitious poetic endeavors.