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Article published In:
English Text Construction
Vol. 16:1 (2023) ► pp.82–108

Dating “Sweet Desire”

C. S. Lewis’s education in alliterative poetics

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C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien are two key figures in the Modern Alliterative Revival, and each sought to revive Old English poetics with close to absolute metrical fidelity. While scholarship on Tolkien’s alliterative verse has seen an uptick in recent years, though, Lewis remains the odd poet out. Nominally, this article attempts to assign a composition date for Lewis’s poem “Sweet Desire.” My dating to early 1930 associates this text with Lewis’s famous conversion to theism. More broadly, this article tracks one revivalist’s painstaking adaptation of the alliterative meter into Modern English, outlining the technical challenges faced by Lewis and which other contemporary revivalists must overcome as well.
Keywords: alliterative meter, C. S. Lewis, Modern Alliterative Revival, J. R. R. Tolkien, poetics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The reluctant (metrical) convert: Lewis through January 1927
  • 3.An overlooked landmark: “The Alliterative Metre” (May 1935)
  • 4.Lewis’s three dated alliterative poems: A discussion
    • A.“The Planets” (May 1935)
    • B.“Artless and Ignorant is Andvāri” (June 26, 192[9?])
    • C. The Nameless Isle (August 1930)
  • 5.Dating “Sweet Desire”
    • A.The broader date: January 1927–August 1930
    • B.The narrower date: Early 1930
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 November 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.22017.wis
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