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Born in London, 1886; educated at St Albans School and University College, London; joined Oxford University Press as a reader, 1908; remained a member of staff (as a literary advisor) until his death, working mainly in London; published his first book of verse, 1912; a prolific author, he continued to write and lecture until his death, producing anthologies, prefaces, reviews, and over thirty volumes of poetry, plays, literary criticism, fiction, biography and theological argument; associates included C S Lewis, T S Eliot and Dorothy Sayers; member of the Church of England; increasingly devoted his writings, particularly his novels, Arthurian poems, and literary and theological commentaries, to doctrines of romantic love (believing that the romantic approach could reveal objective truth) and the coinherence of all humans; abandoned the traditional form of his early verse; in recognition of two courses of lectures in wartime Oxford, awarded an honorary MA (University of Oxford), 1943; died at Oxford, 1945. See also C S Lewis's preface to Essays presented to Charles Williams (Oxford University Press, London, 1947). Publications: Poetry: The Silver Stair (1912); Poems of Conformity (1917); Divorce (1920); Windows of Night (1925); A Myth of Shakespeare (1929); Heroes and Kings (1930); Three Plays (1931); Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury (the Canterbury Festival play, 1936); Taliessin through Logres (1938); Judgement at Chelmsford (1939); The Region of the Summer Stars (1944). Prose: as editor, A Book of Victorian Narrative Verse (1927); Poetry at Present (1930); War in Heaven (1930); Introduction to Gerard Hopkins's Poems (2nd edition, 1930); Many Dimensions (1931); The Place of the Lion (1931); The Greater Trumps (1932); The English Poetic Mind (1932); Shadows of Ecstasy (1933); Bacon (1933); Reason and Beauty in the Poetic Mind (1933); James I (1934); Rochester (1935); Elizabeth (1936); New Book of English Verse (1935); Descent into Hell (1937); Henry VII (1937); He came down from Heaven (1937); Descent of the Dove (1939); Witchcraft (1941); The Forgiveness of Sins (1942); The Figure of Beatrice (1943); as editor, The Letters of Evelyn Underhill (1943); All Hallows' Eve (1944).