Some Poets, Authors, and Books that C. S. Lewis Read in his Youth

...in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. ~C. S. Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism

Here is a list of authors and titles that had an impact on C.S. Lewis. Perhaps you will enjoy reading some of them, too!

Beatrix Potter: especially Squirrel Nutkin

E. Nesbit

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels

George MacDonald: Phantastes

William Morris: The Well at the World's End

Matthew Arnold: Sohrab and Rustum

Thomas Babington Macaulay: Lays of Ancient Rome

G. K. Chesterton: Ballad of the White Horse

Tegner: Drapa

Horace: Odes

Aeneid

Euripides: The Bacchae

Stephen: Crock of Gold

Kenneth Grahame: especially Wind in the Willows

Jane Austen

Rider Haggard (author)

Spenser: The Faerie Queene ("Beyond all doubt it is best to have made one's first acquaintance with Spenser in a very large -- and, preferably, illustrated -- edition of The Faerie Queene, on a wet day, between the ages of twelve and sixteen." --Selected Literary Essays, edited by Walter Hooper, Geoffrey Bles, 1969 p. 146)

H. A. Guerber: The Myths of the Norsemen

Defoe: Robinson Crusoe

John Keats

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Alfred Tennyson (Lotus Eaters, and Morte d'Arthur)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Saga of King Olaf