Charles Williams thought of himself primarily as a poet; he published seven volumes of poetry between 1912 and 1944. He also wrote seven novels and fifteen plays. During his lifetime, however, his most frequently anthologized works were essays of literary criticism, chiefly about poetry, and his essays continued to be anthologized posthumously. In the late twentieth century Williams speaks as a significant and even prophetic voice of his own period, writing with intense awareness of the watershed in literary style and subject matter between the Edwardian era and the era dividing the two world wars.

Charles Walter Stansby Williams was born on 20 September 1886 in Holloway, North London, to Walter and Mary Wall Williams. His parents were devout members of the Church of England. He called himself an "irrevocable bourgeois ... (though a Cockney bourgeois, let me add a little haughtily; there are degrees even in dust)." In 1894 the family moved to...