Part VI. Milton and later English literature
Over seventy years after it was first published, Lewis's A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) remains a seminal work. In it, he introduced the term ‘secondary epic’ to literary criticism, distinguishing Virgil's literary creation from Homer's oral composition, and he argued that any epic after the Aeneid had to take as its subject a single great theme. ‘Secondary epic’ became so embedded as a literary term that W. H. Auden could use it without explanation as the title to one of his poems. Two of the reviews reprinted here add detail to that famous study of Milton. The rest reflect Lewis's interests in later English literature. However much he may have disliked ‘modernism’, he was yet interested in modern literature and modern approaches, and so while authors such as Boswell, Collins, Arnold, Rossetti, Morris, and even Rider Haggard are represented, we also find engagement with the poetry of Yeats and the literary criticism of Harold Bloom.