“The Death of Adonis,” Luca Giordano, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
For Lewis, the raw material for his creative works was not names and language [as it was for Tolkien] but it could be images that would come to his mind. Lewis had a remarkably active and rich imagination; sometimes it would even run away with him and he’d feel like he was going mad. He would have vivid dreams which left him with pictures of scenes that he would reflect on through the years and think about the kind of story he could make out of them. It is no wonder, as Douglas Gresham tells us, that he would be troubled by nightmares at times.
Lewis tells us that he had long had a picture in his mind of a Faun, with an umbrella, carrying packages in the snow. He eventually decided to create an origin for that image, when he began to write his first story for children. He also began having dreams of a lion bounding about, and that had something to do with the character Aslan. But when Lewis tells us about these images and how they inspired him, we must not think that was the only way he found themes or characters for his stories.
There is another vein of creativity in Lewis’s writings that spanned his whole life. Even as a teenager, he gives evidence of loving the idea of taking Classical Greek and Roman myths and reworking them into new stories of his own. At that age, he was already reading more classic literature than most read in their whole lives and loving what he read. At the same time, he was mastering the classical languages. Let us not forget that, though Lewis was a tutor in Medieval and Renaissance English literature at Oxford and was a professor at Cambridge, he had excelled in earning a degree in classical literature at Oxford, and he could have just as easily taught the Greek and Latin classics as English literature.
But, as a youth, he was also reading great works in English, and he would have appreciated how these authors so frequently reworked the old myths or incorporated elements of the myths into their own stories. By way of example, and as a help to understanding just what Lewis was aspiring to do, let us take a brief moment to note how a couple of Lewis’s favourite authors reworked the classics. We’ll look at John Keats and Percy Shelley.
[For Keats, I evaluate Lamia; for Shelley, Adonais. Of interest:]
Lewis liked Shelley's Adonais, but there was another poetic work of Shelley's that we would say Lewis "raved" about. It was also an adaptation of classical mythology, entitled Prometheus Unbound. Lewis speaks of this lyric drama as "the greatest long poem in the nineteenth century, and the only long poem of the highest kind in that century which approaches to perfection" (Selected Essays, p. 205). The fourth part of the epic he considers "perhaps unequaled in its sustained note of ecstasy by any other poet" (208). He believed Shelley the one English poet "yet recorded" who could possibly follow Dante's footsteps; the only other possibly next to Dante in genius (203, 204).