Evil Enchantment and The Weight of Glory: What Dante Taught C.S. Lewis about Poetry with Dr. Jason Baxter

2017-02-21

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From the time he was a child, C. S. Lewis was steeped in what we today call “The Great Books” including Chaucer, Spencer, John Milton, and—the subject of our conversation today—Dante. Lewis read Dante’s Inferno in Italian as a teenager. He read Purgatorio in the hospital during World War I as he recovered from wounds he received in the trenches. Then some fifteen years later—once he gave up his atheism, but before he embrace Christianity—Lewis finally read Paradiso

From the time he was a child, C. S. Lewis was steeped in what we today call “The Great Books” including Chaucer, Spencer, John Milton, and—the subject of our conversation today—Dante.

Lewis read Dante’s Inferno in Italian as a teenager. He read Purgatorio in the hospital during World War I as he recovered from wounds he received in the trenches. Then some fifteen years later—once he gave up his atheism, but before he embrace Christianity—Lewis finally read Paradiso.

This past February 3rd, Dr. Jason Baxter, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts and Humanities at Wyoming Catholic College delivered a lecture entitled “Evil Enchantment and The Weight of Glory: What Dante Taught C.S. Lewis about Poetry.” Dr. Baxter’s expertise includes not only Dante and C. S. Lewis, but all of the philosophers, poets, and writers Lewis studied and loved.

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