Taliessin through Logres

Taliessin through Logres is a cycle of twenty-four poems by Charles Williams, published by Oxford University Press in 1938. Williams, who worked as an editor at the Press and was a member of the Inklings, had been drawn to the Arthurian legends since early manhood and had already written two volumes of Arthurian verse, Arthurian Torso being the commentary that accompanied the later cycle. The poems do not retell Malory. They reimagine Arthur's kingdom, Logres, as a Christian polity in which the Grail, brought to Britain from Byzantium, is the sign of a possible human order, and they follow the court through the eyes of Taliessin, the king's poet, whose imagination holds the whole design together.

The cycle's central conviction is that grace is not opposed to nature but transfigures it. Williams drew his language from what he called the Way of Affirmation, the Christian tradition that finds God by way of images, in the body, in love, in the city, and in human exchange, rather than only by the negation of every image. Taliessin travels from Byzantium to Camelot and watches the kingdom rise and falter. The poems are crowded with figures meant to carry this doctrine: Byzantium as the pattern of an ordered world, the empire as a body whose parts are bound together, Merlin and Brisen at the crossing of time, Percivale and Galahad in pursuit of the Grail, and Lancelot and Guinevere in a love that Williams treats as both genuine and wounding. Recurring themes include coinherence, the mutual indwelling and bearing of burdens that Williams considered the pattern of the Trinity and of Christian community, and the doctrine of substitution, in which one person carries another's weight. Against these he sets the Dolorous Blow, the primal harm that mars the order, and the possibility of its healing.

The verse is dense, allusive, and deliberately difficult. Williams compresses theology, Dante, and Celtic and Byzantine imagery into tight, strongly rhythmic lines, and the cycle assumes a reader willing to meet it slowly and more than once. Readers have long counted it among the most ambitious religious poems of the twentieth century in English. C. S. Lewis, who admired Williams's work and wrote on it, treated the Arthurian poems as a major achievement, and the cycle remains the clearest expression of Williams's vision of romantic and communal love as a path into the life of God.

Who should read this: readers of Dante, of the Inklings, or of Christian poetry who are willing to work for what they receive, and who want to see how a lay theologian imagined the incarnation reaching into politics, desire, and the body. It is not for those looking for a straightforward Arthurian narrative or an easy devotional text. A first-time reader may do better to begin with Williams's prose, such as He Came Down from Heaven, and return to the poems with that groundwork in hand.