Poetry presents οια αν γενοιτο, things that might be

December 9, 2024 12:43 AM

Good reading implies, and good writing demands of its readers, that the emotion should depend not on the name alone, but on the name understood. The name, indeed, rouses emotion, but rouses it through the memory of the thing; that is, through knowledge. And we have seen that no degree of unrealism in the imagination impairs this principle a whit. from CS Lewis: An unseen essay on truth and fiction [Grauniad [from 2013]; ungated]
posted by chavenet (3 comments total)

This looks like something he would have rewritten before publication. There's a lot of incomplete sentences that read like notes to be expanded into a full paragraph.

It also seems like the result of Lewis and Tolkien's conversations down at the Bird and Baby pub about the nature of Fantasy, so it's definitely worth reading.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 1:29 AM on December 9, 2024 [2 favorites]

"bats" would have a different poetical value from birds. Yet the images will scarcely be distinguishable: and neither their bat nature or their bird nature will be explicitly imagined. It is enough to give them the one or the other name and they will affect us accordingly: and this because we know what bats and birds are in the real world, and therefore what these would be in the real world.
And however we vary the fantasy we shall find the same result. Let these bell-born birds be no common birds but the souls of dead men whose blood was used to temper the bells: and let them fly out singing with human voice

what is it like to be a bat? [upenn (17-page pdf)/wiki]
posted by HearHere at 3:41 AM on December 9, 2024 [2 favorites]

It also seems like the result of Lewis and Tolkien's conversations down at the Bird and Baby pub about the nature of Fantasy, so it's definitely worth reading.

Lewis, on The Lord of the Rings:

This book is like lightning from a clear sky; as sharply different, as unpredictable in our age as Songs of Innocence were in theirs. To say that in it heroic romance, gorgeous, eloquent, and unashamed, has suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in its anti-romanticism is inadequate. To us, who live in that odd period, the return—and the sheer relief of it—is doubtless the important thing. But in the history of Romance itself—a history which stretches back to the Odyssey and beyond—it makes not a return but an advance or revolution: the conquest of new territory.

Nothing quite like it was ever done before. ‘One takes it’, says Naomi Mitchison, ‘as seriously as Malory’. But then the ineluctable sense of reality which we feel in the Morte d’Arthur comes largely from the great weight of other men’s work built up century by century, which has gone into it. The utterly new achievement of Professor Tolkien is that he carries a comparable sense of reality unaided. Probably no book yet written in the world is quite such a radical instance of what its author has elsewhere called ‘sub-creation’. The direct debt (there are of course subtler kinds of debt) which every author must owe to the actual universe is here deliberately reduced to the minimum. Not content to create his own story, he creates, with an almost insolent prodigality, the whole world in which it is to move, with its own theology, myths, geography, history, palaeography, languages, and orders of beings—a world ‘full of strange creatures beyond count’. ...

Such a book has of course its predestined readers, even now more numerous and more critical than is always realised. To them a reviewer need say little, except that here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron; here is a book that will break your heart.

posted by Lemkin at 6:08 AM on December 9, 2024 [7 favorites]