What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s first published work, a 1919 collection of poems?

Spirits in Bondage was C.S. Lewis’s first published work, a collection of poems published in 1919.

The volume appeared under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton. Lewis was still a young man, and the poems reflect themes of captivity, suffering, nature and spiritual uncertainty. The title comes from the collection’s mood of constraint and reflects the influence of wartime experience and the literary interests of his youth.

Lewis had served in the British Army during the First World War and was wounded in 1918. Spirits in Bondage therefore belongs to an early period before his later fame as a Christian apologist and children’s novelist. The collection is less widely read than his later prose, but it is important for understanding that he began as a poet and literary writer.

Dymer, another early poetic work, followed in 1926 and was also published under the name Clive Hamilton. The Pilgrim’s Regress appeared in 1933, after Lewis’s conversion to Christianity and the beginning of his major religious writing.