Unpublished Arthurian Poems

This post is of especial interest to those of my followers who like Charles Williams, the Inklings, Arthurian literature, or poetry in general. Enjoy!

And we thought we had it all! In 1991, David Dodds published a volume of Williams’s Arthurian poetry that included a large number of previously-unpublished pieces. We thought that was about it. But since then, David has continued collecting other such poems as he comes across them, and then I spent two intense days untangling the mare’s next of material at the Marion E. Wade Center. There were duplicated folders, partially duplicated folders, multiple versions of poems, manuscripts, typescripts, photocopies, photocopies of manuscripts, photocopies of typescripts, hand-written corrections, piles of verses out of order, tables of contents that didn’t match up to actual contents… it was a right mess! So I sorted through it all and eventually figured out what was what. The awesome Archivist plans to use my notes to help clean up the catalog entries and make this stuff easier for the next research to approach.

Not that there are likely to be too many other humans on the planet who will read these materials. First, because hardly anyone else is interested; David, Grevel Lindop, Eric Rauscher, and I are pretty much the only people working it. Second, because John Mabry at Apocryphile Press wants to publish whichever poems David isn’t already in process of publishing, so between us, it should all be available to the public sooner or later!

Here are some brief notes on what I discovered; I have much more thorough notes with catalog identifiers and more info, so you happen to be working on this material, too, please get in touch.

1. CW put together a bunch of his unpublished Arthurian poems into a collection he called The Advent of Galahad. His friend Margaret Douglas typed it up; her typescript is in the Bodleian. There are several copies of this collection in the Wade, some complete, some partial, some with hand-written notes, some in slightly different versions. David already published most of this collection in his 1991 volume and is planning to publish the rest of them soon. There are also fragments that apparently CW intended to include in this collection, but he never finished them.
2. There are two Tables of Contents in the archive for a new volume of Arthurian poetry CW planned to write, to be called Jupiter Over Carbonek. I don’t think any of the named poems actually exist.
3. There are several folders of poetry labeled “For Margaret and Isabel Douglas,” and several of the items are Arthurian in theme or imagery.
4. There are several collections of poetry for “Celia” (Phyllis Jones), and many of the pieces use Arthurian in theme or imagery. The first is a folder labeled “Poems Mostly About Celia.”
5. The next Celian collection is A Century of Poems for Celia.
6. Then there’s a pile of unlabeled Celian poems stuck into the same folder as the Century. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll call it Other Poems to Celia.
7. Finally, there’s a series of 22 poems, plus epilogue, called The Dianeme Sequence.

Each of these numbered items could be a book on its own or contained in a larger volume. I’ll be consulting with other CW scholars, the Estate, and publishers to figure out the best way to present them. Isn’t it exciting?!!

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