"To take part... in a great mimetic dance" | A Preface to Paradise Lost by C.S. Lewis book review

Last Friday I got to finish C. S. Lewis' 'A Preface to Paradise Lost', just after spending a full week on assessment deadlines. Despite a busy semester, it has been such a wonderful enriching read and a beautiful dive into Lewis's masterful literary scholarship. One of the things that struck me from his analysis is his lively writing style when talking about Milton or Homer or Virgil. His literary scholarship is not dry and static but imaginative and loaded with a vision for literature that is broad and unique, and refreshingly down-to-earth. Examples of this jumped out to me in those passages:

"[Milton] makes his epic a rite so that we may share it; the more ritual it becomes, the more we are elevated to the rank of participants. Precisely because the poet appears not as a private person, but as a Hierophant or Choregus, we are summoned not to hear what one particular man thought and felt about the Fall, but to take part, under his leadership, in a great mimetic dance of all Christendom, ourselves soaring and ruining from Heaven, ourselves enacting Hell and Paradise, the Fall and the repentance." - pg. 60

"The Hierarchical idea is not merely stuck on his poems at points where doctrine demands it: it is the indwelling life of the whole work, it foams or burgeons out of it at every moment." - pg. 79

"He pictures the life of beatitude as one of order—an intricate dance, so intricate that it seems irregular precisely when its regularity is most elaborate (v, 620). He pictures his whole universe as a universe of degrees, from root to stalk, from stalk to flower, from flower to breath, from fruit to human reason (v, 480)" - pg 79

This idea of enacting Hell and Paradise, the Fall, and the repentance reminds me of Lewis' own interests in his imaginative works, such as we see in Perelandra or in Narnia's Magician's Nephew with the Creation and Fall narratives. I also found it really interesting how he applies his theory about readership - the idea that we are summoned to take part "in a great mimetic dance" ourselves in the story. I highly recommend reading this work, not only to gain deeper insight into Milton (which you absolutely will!), but into Lewis as well...