LEWIS, Clive Staples (1898-1963). Writer on religious topics and for children.
Fine Autograph Letter Signed ('C.S. Lewis') to [Herbert] Palmer, 1¼ pages large 4to, Magdalen College, Oxford, 23 January 1950.

Begging Palmer to not apologise for failing to write a bread-and-butter letter ('I hate 'em. They belong, with After Dinner Speeches to a curious class of compositions which give pleasure neither to the artist nor the audience'), discussing Palmer's new book (of poems) at some length after explaining that he had read it before seeing the covering letter ('I marked Cats of the Sky as one of the high lights ... so there is independent confirmation for you'), and revealing his own philosophy.

'... I suspect that if I knew enough (my real sympathy with French literature ends with Ronsard) I shd. heartily agree with yr. remarks about the non-necessity of an English symbolist movement. Isn't a great deal of the modern Advanced literary movement a needless importation - or re-importation - through cheap French derivatives of things we have always had? The Abbé Brémond produced as paradoxical novelties things wh. every English boy had always known in his bones and taken for granted. ...'

Herbert Edward Palmer (1880-1961) was a close friend of C.S. Lewis, whom he introduced to Rith Pitter. It is not immediately clear to which of Palmer's many literary works the present letter refers. This letter is not among the many from Lewis to Palmer published in the three-volume Collected Letters, ed. Walter Hooper (all at Texas), and apparently unpublished.
[No: 26003]