21. Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886–1945): an obituary
With the death of Mr Charles Williams, Oxford loses one of those extraordinary gifts which the upheaval of war sometimes bestows. Evacuation brought him to Oxford, and he hardly survived the victory. To that part of Oxford which is concerned with English poetry, and to that part which is concerned with the Christian religion, the war years will always be associated with this remarkable figure. There were, of course two reactions to him. Those who did not greatly love were, quite frankly, bewildered. He suffered fools gladly, but fools, specially of the solemn kind, did not return the compliment and some who were not fools distrusted an outlook so widely different from their own. In this I think they were mistaken.
His critical views, however idiosyncratic, were all derived from the texts before him. His fundamental postulate was that great poets meant exactly what they said; the plain sense of the words was the only key. The incantatory richness of his recitation was not in the least an irrelevance; it was an exposition. The excitement which he aroused in his audience was one which sent them back to the poets, not one which focused their attention on him.
It is indeed possible, and it is to be hoped, that his death will for the first time, turn the attention of many from his critical to his original work. As a novelist and, above all, as a poet, Mr Williams represents an unexpected transformation of the romantic impulse – a transformation conveniently symbolized by the ‘Byzantine’ and ‘Arthurian’ elements in his poetry, or again by the fact that, being of Welsh descent, he yet gloried in being a ‘cockney.’
In all his best work we find the storminess, the richness, and the suggestive qualities of romantic art, but all directed towards and composed by a love for order, discipline, ritual, dogma, even for the geometric. In him the tradition which had begun in being pantheistic, revolutionary, and antinomian becomes Nicene, hierarchical, severe. It is not a Celtic Twilight, but a Celtic Noon (‘patterns of the Logos in the depth of the sun’).
It is, of course, too early to predict his final literary position; but it would not be absurd to guess that he will in the end stand as the great English poet of this age. At least, if the difficulty of his work prevents this, we shall have lost the only poetic experience in English which can, in any profound sense, be called Pindaric. Of the man himself – no one in Oxford who would care to hear needs to be told.