My own conviction is that poetry is far the deepest in us,
and that prose is only broken-down poetry;
and likewise that to this our lives correspond….
As you will hear some people read poetry so that no mortal could tell it was poetry,
so do some people read their own lives and those of others.
George MacDonald (1824-1905), Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood, Chapter 7.
His Scottish father told George MacDonald, 'to give over the fruitless game of poetry.' But C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), who described him as 'my master' and valued him not as a writer but as his 'Christian teacher', recognised his Christian genius. Through Macdonald's imaginative work he discovered the difference between 'prosaic moralism which confines goodness to the region of Law and Duty' and 'the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic reality in which we all live.' Moreover: 'The Divine Sonship of Jesus Christ is the key conception which unites all the different elements of his thought.'
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