Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry

This book contains Christopher Caudwell’s 1937 treatise, “Illusion and Reality”. It is a work of Marxist literary criticism that develops the idea that each individual era of British poetry stems from a novel economical paradigm in bourgeois society. Christopher St John Sprigg (1907–1937), more commonly known by his pseudonym 'Christopher Caudwell', was a British Marxist poet and thinker. In early life, he made his way to Marxism and set about rethinking everything in light of it, from poetry to