What pen name did C.S. Lewis use when publishing poetry in the 1930s?

C.S. Lewis used the pen name Clive Hamilton when publishing poetry in the 1930s.

Lewis chose “Clive Hamilton” for two poetry collections: Spirits in Bondage, published in 1919, and Dymer, published in 1926. The name combined his first name, Clive, with Hamilton, a family name connected to his mother’s side.

The pseudonym can cause confusion because Lewis later used another name, N.W. Clerk, for The Allegory of Love, his 1936 scholarly study of medieval and Renaissance literature. Clive Hamilton was specifically associated with his early poetry, written before he became widely known as a Christian author and writer of children’s fiction.

Lewis’s poetry career was much less commercially successful than his later prose. Spirits in Bondage appeared shortly after his service in the First World War, while Dymer was a long narrative poem influenced by myth and epic traditions.