Mr. C. S. Lewis [in The Allegory of Love] was moved to attack the personal heresy in modern criticism. The first essay in the elegant small book is his spirited, and to some extent salutary, denunciation of contemporary critics and readers who regard poetry as a means of contact with the poet's personality. So shocking does this seem to Mr. Lewis, that he has boldly taken up the extreme negative position: "… when we read poetry as poetry should be read, we have before us no representation which claims to be the poet, and frequently no representation of a man, a character, or a personality at all." (p. 596)
No doubt a corrective was needed for the psychological-biographical school which, not content with using the biography to illuminate the work, rather lays the work under contribution to complete the portrait of the man, and makes the poet rather than his very title to consideration—his poetry—the proper end of enjoyment. But reduction of the poet to mere linguistic interpreter of the natural world to man could not, of course, go unchallenged. Mr. Lewis was fortunate enough to provoke a distinguished adversary, Dr. E.M.W. Tillyard … whose study of Milton he had cited as exemplifying the personal heresy. From this point the discussion becomes a controversy in due form [resulting in a collection of essays published jointly by Lewis and Tillyard entitled The Personal Heresy]. (pp. 596-97)
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