Lost But Found: The "Missing" Poems of C.S. Lewis's Spirits in Bondage‪.‬

The status of the literary corpus of C. S. Lewis's prose has largely been resolved. While Walter Hooper's latest project, the collected letters, (1) will undoubtedly produce a number of heretofore unpublished letters, it is doubtful that any "new" essays or works of fiction will appear, particularly given the controversy provoked by Hooper's publication of The Dark Tower (1977). (2) At the same time, the status of Lewis's unpublished poetry remains unresolved. (3) Specifically, in the preface to the 1986 reprint of Lewis's Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (1919), Hooper reviewed the initial publication history of this volume, Lewis's first published work. He did this primarily by drawing on Warren Lewis's notes in "The Lewis Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family, 1850-1930." Warren's careful assessment of the development of Spirits in Bondage includes reference to an early collection of poems titled "The Metrical Meditations of a Cod": Hooper then noted that the "Metrical Meditations" were lost, perhaps, according to Warren, in a fire since "Jack himself burnt all documents therein transcribed [in "LP"], including his own diaries, in or soon after 1936" (xii).