What name did C.S. Lewis use for his early poetry published before World War II?

C.S. Lewis used the pseudonym Clive Hamilton for his early poetry collections Spirits in Bondage and Dymer.

Spirits in Bondage was published in 1919, while Lewis was still a young man and had recently served in the First World War. Dymer, a longer narrative poem, appeared in 1926. Both books were issued under Clive Hamilton rather than Lewis’s familiar literary name.

The pseudonym helped separate these poems from Lewis’s later public identity as a Christian writer, literary scholar, and author of fantasy. The name is especially easy to confuse with Lewis’s other pen name, N.W. Clerk, which he used for The Allegory of Love and other scholarly work.

Lewis’s poetry is less widely read today than The Chronicles of Narnia, but it documents his early interests in mythology, morality, suffering, and spiritual uncertainty. His later fiction and apologetics developed many of those concerns in different forms.