What was C.S. Lewis’s first published book, a 1919 collection of poems written under a pseudonym?

Spirits in Bondage was C.S. Lewis’s first published book, a 1919 collection of poems written under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton. Lewis was about twenty years old when the volume appeared.

The poems reflect the influence of classical literature, Romantic poetry, and the emotional aftermath of the First World War. Lewis had served as a British Army officer and was wounded in France in 1918. The collection’s skeptical and sometimes bleak tone differs sharply from the explicitly Christian works for which he later became famous.

Lewis did not initially publish poetry under his familiar initials. His next poetry collection, Dymer, appeared in 1926 under the name Clive Hamilton as well. Readers sometimes mistake The Pilgrim’s Regress for his first book because it was his first major prose work associated with his Christian return, but Spirits in Bondage came earlier.