[The long narrative poem "Dymer," written by C. S. Lewis under the pseudonym of Clive Hamilton] is notable because it is in the epic tradition and yet is modern in idiom, and reflects a profoundly personal intuition…. [Doubtless] the prejudice which exists against the epic as a modern art form is due to a belief that in civilized hands it must prove an impure form, a form in which substance and idea are not necessarily related.

Mr. Hamilton has disproved that belief by showing that, in the modern epic, the spiritual may be translated into terms of the physical as inevitably as, in the primitive epic, the physical was translated into terms of the imaginative. He has shown this more convincingly than Mr. Masefield in "Dauber," with which his poem may be usefully compared, because Dymer's experience is throughout metaphysical. His ordeal is not on the high seas...