What was C.S. Lewis’s pen name for the 1930 poetry collection Spirits in Bondage?

C.S. Lewis used the pen name Clive Hamilton for his 1919 poetry collection Spirits in Bondage.

The book was published when Lewis was 20 and is one of his earliest major works. Its poems reflect the emotional and intellectual atmosphere surrounding the First World War, as well as themes of suffering, doubt, nature, and spiritual longing.

Clive Hamilton combined Lewis’s first name with a surname borrowed from his mother’s family. The name is distinct from N.W. Clerk, the pseudonym he later used for A Grief Observed, a book about grief after his wife’s death.

Spirits in Bondage appeared before Lewis became widely known as a Christian apologist or children’s novelist. It therefore offers a glimpse of his early poetic voice, before the publication of The Pilgrim’s Regress, The Space Trilogy, and The Chronicles of Narnia.