What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s first published poetry collection?

Spirits in Bondage was the title of C.S. Lewis’s first published poetry collection.

The collection appeared in 1919 under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton. Lewis was twenty years old, and many of the poems reflect the experience and atmosphere of the First World War. Their themes include suffering, mortality, nature, disillusionment, and the struggle to find meaning.

Lewis served in the British Army during the First World War and was wounded in 1918. His wartime experience helps explain the somber tone found in parts of the collection, although the poems are literary works rather than a straightforward autobiography.

The book is often overlooked because Lewis later became best known for prose. It should also be distinguished from Dymer, a longer narrative poem published in 1926 under the same pseudonym. Lewis’s early poetry shows that his literary career began years before his major Christian and fantasy books.