Dating the Undated Poems in Don King’s Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis: A Critical Edition

Don W. King made a monumental contribution to Lewis studies when he released his Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis: A Critical Edition. Prior to this volume, Lewis’s poetry was scattered among at least four books and much remained unpublished. King gathered all of Lewis’s poetry, apart from a few poetic fragments, into a single volume. Since the book’s publication in 2015, a handful of additional Lewis poems have been discovered. Nevertheless, the fact that the vast majority of Lewis’s poetry now exists in a single volume remains a huge step forward in Lewis scholarship and our ability to appreciate Lewis as poet. King’s approach was to publish the poems in chronological order, assigning dates based on a variety of factors including year of publication and the appearance of poems in dated letters. In some instances, King had to offer his best scholarly guess, giving “circa” dates to the poems, and in the case of forty-seven poems, King was able to provide no date at all. These poems he placed in a section at the back of the Critical Edition.