It might sound to some like damning with faint praise to say that I am almost inclined to call it a great poem: but you are a critic as well as a poet and will understand that this is about as far as one could sanely go about a work which one has only read once. But I have good hopes that my first impression will turn out to have been correct.

For one thing, the long poem is rather my special subject - I'd trust my own criticism on that Form more than on any other... I think the form (in the largest sense) is a wonderful invention: I mean, having the story told thro' the actors, still chewing it over. I suppose this might be called an adaptation of the Ring and the Book technique. But having it told in Sheol adds a particular sense of unchangeableness - the eternity of the past. And how do you manage to use this device without for one moment raising (even in so theological an imagination as mine) the least interest in anyone's beliefs about the actual status of the dead? which of course wd. be a ruinous distraction.

Another most brilliant success is the utterly unexpected addition of rhyme on p. 121, which, coming against the vast metrical background of unrhymed verse, is as if a Bell began to toll. And another is the intrusion of [the author] among the speakers (you have noticed how, on a tiny scale and with predominantly comic effect, this is anticipated by Henryson in some of the Fables?

...One or two bits seemed to have a certain (purely verbal) suggestion of our Charles Williams. Is there any influence?

The next English edtn. shd. have a Glossary. Only one of my colleagues knew what a 'painter' means in American. I got it right myself, but it was by guessing...

With many thanks for a profoundly moving and (without this, to be 'moved' is nothing) satisfying experience.
- from an 8 May 1954 letter to the author, in The collected letters of C.S. Lewis, volume III ( )