These letters to "Michal," Williams endearing name for his wife, from "Serge," a moniker by which his most intimate friends addressed him, are more than just a collection of love letters--they are significant for what they tell us about the man, for the light they throw on his work, and for the way they show Williams in the context of his literary contemporaries (C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Dorothy L. Sayers, Christopher Fry, and Edith Sitwell). In fact, Williams felt that T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis were the only two people other than his wife to whom he could talk seriously about...

Charles Williams has achieved considerable reputation for his novels. He has been recognized as a brilliant theologian and a sensitive literary critic. But Williams himself wished most to be remembered as a poet, and trusted his future literary reputation to the two-volume series of poems on the Arthurian theme, Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars.Of the first volume Williams wrote: "The matter and the style require and reward attention. The poems do not so much tell a story or describe a process as express states or principles of experience. The names and incidents of...