Which medieval poem did C.S. Lewis describe as a major influence on his imagination?

The Divine Comedy was a major influence on C.S. Lewis’s imagination. Dante Alighieri’s poem, written in the fourteenth century, follows a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise under the guidance of Virgil and Beatrice.

Lewis knew Dante as a scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature and repeatedly engaged with the poem in his writing. Dante’s structured moral universe, symbolic journey, and vivid treatment of the afterlife helped shape Lewis’s understanding of medieval literature and Christian imagination.

Lewis’s own works are not translations or direct retellings of The Divine Comedy. His science-fiction and fantasy writing draws on many sources, including classical mythology, medieval romance, Norse legend, and Christian theology. That broad mixture is why no single influence explains all of Narnia or the Space Trilogy.

The other listed poems are also important English or European literary works, but Dante’s poem is especially central to Lewis’s medieval literary outlook. Lewis wrote scholarly essays on Dante and taught the traditions in which the poem developed.