Under what pen name did C.S. Lewis publish the poetry collection Spirits in Bondage?

C.S. Lewis published Spirits in Bondage under the pen name Clive Hamilton.

Spirits in Bondage was Lewis’s first published book, appearing in 1919. At the time, he used the pseudonym Clive Hamilton rather than the initials that later became famous. The collection reflects the young Lewis’s bleak and questioning outlook, written before his return to Christianity.

The name combines his own first name, Clive, with Hamilton, a family name connected to his mother’s side. Lewis later published The Pilgrim’s Regress under his real initials, C.S. Lewis, in 1933. That change of byline makes the early poetry easy to overlook in accounts of his career.

The collection is sometimes confused with Lewis’s later poetry volumes, including Dymer, which appeared in 1926 under the same pen name. Spirits in Bondage is not a Narnia title or a Christian apologetic work; it belongs to Lewis’s early poetic period and predates his conversion to Christianity.