However, most critics agree that Williams's strength as a fiction writer grew throughout his career, and at least the last two novels,
Descent into Hell (1937) and
All Hallows' Eve (1945), succeed both aesthetically and philosophically.
Yet, Williams considered himself primarily a poet, and some critics, such as W. H. Auden, find Williams's novels disappointing compared to his poetry. By "Williams's poetry," critics and scholars usually mean his Arthurian poetry, collected in Taliessin through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944). This Arthurian--or, more accurately, Grail--poetry is, as Roma A. King Jr. writes, "the poetical creation of a coherent mythical vision of man and his place in the larger creation of which he is a part." Some find these poems almost willfully obscure, both in language and in their dependence on a complex set of associations among character, animals, places, and the symbolic associations of each.
Charles Walter Stansby Williams was born on 20 September 1886 in Holloway, North London, England, and baptized at the Anglican church of St. Anne's, Finsbury Park, on 7 November. His only sister, Edith, was born in 1889; she and Charles were close throughout his life. Williams recalled fond memories of London from early on; he could read easily at five years of age, and his parents, Walter and Mary (née Wall) Williams, managed to send him to a private school, St.
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