Customer Reviews

Narrative Poems

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Narrative poems are distinguished because of their aim to tell a story, rather than share a few thoughts, feelings, or experiences like shorter poetry does. For my money, the best narrative poet is Longfellow, with great tales like Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish, or Evangeline; Lewis wrote four narrative poems, only one of which reached publication during his lifetime: Dymer. Dymer is long and complicated and only partially successful as a good story. Walter Hooper, who edited this volume, feels that The Queen of the Drum was Lewis's best of the four poems, while I thought it the least interesting. The two best poems of this book are Launcelot and The Nameless Isle (and not just because they - at 9 and 21 pages respectively - are by far the shortest ones in the book.) I loved the imagery Lewis invoked with these two poems, the nostalgia and almost mystical pull of these stories. If you love narrative poetry, buy this book. If you don't like narrative poetry, this book won't change your tastes.

In 1953, when an American lady wrote to C.S. Lewis about acquiring British first editions of _The Screwtape Letters_ and _The Great Divorce_, he advised her against doing so, on the grounds that they were "scrubby little things on rotten paper". (See _Collected Letters_, vol. 3, p. 282.) The package that arrived from Amazon today proves that Lewis's work is still occasionally being published in scrubby little editions: _Narrative Poems_ has gone print-on-demand. Ugh! The cheap-looking copy with muddied text that was sent to me was printed in Lexington, Kentucky (site of Amazon's distribution center) this month. (See the "product images" section of this page for a comparison between the magnified images of the same letter "e" in the original edition and this print-on-demand edition.)

Even though this is one of only 3 or 4 books by Lewis I haven't read yet, I wouldn't have bought it if I had known it would look like this. The only poem in the book that Lewis had published while he was alive is "Dymer", which will be out of copyright before too long. If, like Lewis, you care about quality printing, I suggest you wait to read "Dymer" till then. Don't support Amazon and Harcourt's unholy alliance to foist inferior editions on the reading public.