A personal friend of T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Christopher Fry, and C.S. Lewis, to mention only a few, Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886-1945) was a self-educated, somewhat scholarly, rather ugly-faced Londoner with a Cockney accent. As a married man with the usual economic difficulties that disturb family life, he was forced to supplement his income as an editor for Oxford University Press by lecturing, tutoring, and writing. In a comparatively short life time he produced more than fifty works, several published posthumously, plus a considerable number of articles, book reviews, and verses for British and Irish periodicals. The annotated bibliography at the end of this study gives a general indication of the scope and value of this literary output. Since the death of Charles Williams, something like a cult has grown up about his name, not only in Anglican literary circles in England but also in various university and church circles in America. The reasons for this are not always obvious, but one fact appears to be certain: the cult is usually concerned with Williams, the philosopher, or Williams, the theologian, or Williams, the novelist. T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, and C.S. Lewis, for example, have discussed briefly one or all three of these facets of Williams' literary personality, and the latter two have acknowledged a certain literary indebtedness to him. As yet, however, few members of the cult recognize Williams as a dramatist, poet, literary critic and theorist, historian and biographer, and editor. Moreover, with the exception of C.S. Lewis, no member of the cult has attempted a scholarly investigation of any aspect of Williams' thought. The present study is a critical exploration of one of these avenues of thought: Williams' concept of the nature of poetry. The conclusion of this study indicates that the members of the cult should seriously consider him as a literary critic and theorist. At a time when modern criticism still exhibits the confusion inherited from its romantic background, it is no mean achievement for Williams to separate the art of poetry from the other intellectual disciplines and to claim that "poetry is a thing sui generis.--p. vii.