A Light Beyond Jupiter

Anyone interested in the Inkling Poets will find this book both fascinating and insightful about "the oddest Inkling," Charles Williams. Scholars of Dante, Tennyson, the Inklings, the Theology of Romantic Love, or the Arthurian poetical tradition will appreciate this work as critical to their research. C. S. Lewis considered Charles Williams to be perhaps the greatest Inkling. Other Williams' contemporaries echoed Lewis' esteem for Williams, such as W. H. Auden, who referred to Williams as "the only writer since Dante who has found out how to make poetry of theology and history." Acknowledging Williams to be the greatest of all Dante scholars, Dorothy Sayers called him the "Master of the Affirmations." Besides those accolades, Williams has certainly earned his reputation as the most eminent and prolific Arthurian poet since Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Williams' Arthurian poems represent not only his uniquely creative expression of Arthuriansim but also an attempt to correct what Williams thought was Tennyson's mishandling of the Arthurian tradition, especially his "celestialization" of Sir Galahad and his dematerialization of the Holy Grail. However, to read Williams' poems in light of Tennyson, but apart from a recognition of Dante's influence upon Williams, will result not only in a deficient understanding of Williams' Arthurian poems but also in an underestimation of Williams as a poet. Most important to Williams' Arthurian poetry is his incorporation of Dante's image of the Holy Trinity as a "point of light," which Williams reinvents as "a light beyond Jupiter," the supreme expression of Williams' Trinitarianism and "the consummation of his thought and art."