Tracing Sehnsucht: Longing for the "Hidden Country"

Abstract

"This thesis will argue that Lewis employs a consistent set of literary themes and biblical echoes to articulate longing throughout his career, and that his early non-Christian, and often anti-Christian, poetry, such as Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (1919) and Dymer (1926), plays a formative role in shaping his later depictions of Sehnsucht. Although his theological commitments and vocabulary evolve significantly after his conversion, an engagement with a predominantly Judeo-Christian literary inheritance is apparent from the outset. A central focus here will be Lewis’s use of place. In his early poetry, recurring biblical resonances, conceptual images, and spatial metaphors, reveal an emerging vision of an elusive “country” or “island” that anti- cipates the more mature expressions of longing in his later Christian works. By tracing these early imaginative building blocks of Sehnsucht and observing how they gain depth across his subsequent writing, this paper will highlight the continuity and development of a theme which ultimately dominated Lewis’s literary and spiritual life."