What pen name did C.S. Lewis use for the 1918 poetry collection Spirits in Bondage?

C.S. Lewis used the pen name Clive Hamilton for his 1918 poetry collection Spirits in Bondage.

Spirits in Bondage was Lewis’s first published book. It appeared during the First World War, when Lewis was a young officer and former student at Oxford. The collection contains poems influenced by classical literature, romantic poetry, and the bleak circumstances of wartime life.

Lewis chose “Clive Hamilton” as a pseudonym by combining his preferred first name, Clive, with a surname associated with his mother’s family. He later published poetry under his own initials, including Dymer in 1926, which appeared as a work by C.S. Lewis.

The early poems do not present the Christian worldview for which Lewis later became famous. His intellectual and religious development changed significantly after the war, and he returned to Christianity in the early 1930s. Spirits in Bondage therefore offers a valuable glimpse of Lewis before his major apologetic and fantasy works.