The poet Elizabeth Jennings reviews a book of reminiscences about C. S. Lewis, whom she heard lecture when a student at St Anne's college. The book, Light on C. S. Lewis, included contributions from Owen Barfield, Stella Gibbons, Austin Farrer, Kathleen Raine, and Neville Coghill, but not J. R. R. Tolkien.  Jennings — whose New Selected Poems was recently published — does not admire Lewis's poetry. The Catholic Herald profiled her in 1992. She died in 2001.The full review can be read here. It appeared in the 10 December 1965 issue.   I am probably one of the last of the generation which sat in the Hall of Magdalen College, Oxford, and listened entranced to the lectures of the late C. S. Lewis. Known by most of us as a tantalising religious apologist (a true "devil's advocate") and also as a great literary critic — he valued literature, and poetry in particular, beyond anything that could ever be said about it — he was possibly at first sight something of a disappointment. For one thing he looked so utterly unlike what one had expected: large, red-faced, beefy, possessed with a rotund and booming voice, he seemed remote from his own delicate, probing and always sensitive writing. Soon, however, one realised that the surprising appearance of the man did not matter at all. What mattered was his enthusiasm for literature, his desire to impart and share this enthusiasm, his great learning, and his compassion both for the ignorance and the innocence of the very young.