Although best known as the wife of C. S. Lewis, Joy Davidman was a gifted writer. In particular she was a very good poet; her Letter to a Comrade (1938) won both the Yale Younger Poet competition and the Russell Loines Memorial award for poetry given by the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In this essay I sketch the development of Davidman as a poet, explore a thematic discussion of the poems in Letter to a Comrade, and offer a brief critical assessment of the volume as a whole.
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References
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DavidmanJoy. Letter to a Comrade. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938.
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KingDon W.“Joy Davidman and the New Masses: Communist Poet and Reviewer.”The Chronicle of the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society4, no. 1 (February 2007): 18–44.
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