Who co-wrote The Personal Heresy with C.S. Lewis?

E.M.W. Tillyard co-wrote The Personal Heresy with C.S. Lewis.

The Personal Heresy: A Controversy is a 1939 book by C.S. Lewis and E.M.W. Tillyard. It developed from a series of published exchanges about whether poetry should be understood primarily as an expression of the poet’s personality.

Tillyard, an English literary scholar at Cambridge, argued for a view that gave substantial importance to the poet’s personal character and mind. Lewis challenged aspects of that approach and emphasized broader literary and imaginative considerations. The book preserves the debate in a structured form rather than presenting a single-author theory.

The title’s “heresy” refers to the authors’ characterization of what they considered an excessive focus on personality in criticism. It is an academic literary controversy, not a religious dispute. Lewis’s other major scholarly works include The Allegory of Love and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.