What was C.S. Lewis’s pen name for his early poetry collection Spirits in Bondage?

C.S. Lewis published his early poetry collection Spirits in Bondage under the pen name Clive Hamilton. The book appeared in 1919, when Lewis was twenty years old and had recently returned from service in the First World War.

The collection reflects the bleak, skeptical mood of much of Lewis’s early poetry. Its poems explore suffering, mortality, nature, and religious doubt. At that stage Lewis was not the committed Christian author later known for apologetics and Narnia; his conversion to Christianity took place more than a decade afterward.

Clive Hamilton combined Lewis’s preferred first name, Clive, with a surname that was not his family name. Lewis later used another name, N.W. Clerk, for a scholarly biography of George MacDonald. These pseudonyms can cause confusion because “Jack” was Lewis’s familiar personal nickname, while “Clive Hamilton” was specifically connected with his first published poetry volume.