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

 

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 3^rd, 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.