William Wootten writes:

There is in the letters a high ardency that extends well beyond the declarations of love: whether in their Lawrentian regard for the natural world, in Lewis’s descriptions of his life, or in his recording of the near sacral parts of his existence, especially his feeling for swimming and for lakes. It is no wonder that Aykroyd was so swayed by them . . . Accounts of the poetry of the Second World War tend to describe a move away from the social and political concerns of the 1930s either towards the immediate actualities of the war or, in the case of the neo-romanticists, towards myth, the psyche, a grand style, arcana. Lewis tried to accommodate his work to his circumstances, to soldiering and to India; and he began to develop a personal symbolism in an attempt to describe a true reality that had been vouchsafed to him in a vision of ‘ice-cold death images of perfect poetry’ in a place of high upland pastures, of which Coonoor, perhaps, reminded him. But the political is not abandoned: Lewis’s archetypal soldiers, gypsies and peasants comment on contemporary social conditions and political concerns.

(LRB 5 July 2007)

Enitharmon Press | Paperback 272 pp. |ISBN: 9781904634300