Cecil Day-Lewis

Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972). Courtesy Wikipedia.

Cecil Day-Lewis
Born	27 April 1904 (Template:Four digit-04-27) Ballintubbert, Co. Laois, Ireland
Died	22 May 1972 (Template:Four digit-05-23) (aged 68) Hadley Wood, Hertfordshire, England
Pen name	Nicholas Blake
Occupation	Poet, Novelist
Spouse(s)	Constance Mary King (1928-1951) Jill Balcon (1951-1972)
Children	Tamasin Day-Lewis (b. 1953) Daniel Day-Lewis (b. 1957) Sean Day-Lewis (b. 1931) Nicholas Day-Lewis (b. 1934)

C. Day-Lewis (or C. Day Lewis) CBE (27 April 1904 - 22 May 1972) was an Irish-born English poet who served as Poet Laureate. He also wrote bestselling mystery novels under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake.

Life

Family

He was born Cecil Day-Lewis, 27 April 1904 in Ballintubbert, Co. Laois, the only child of Frank Cecil Day-Lewis, Church of Ireland curate, and his wife, Kathleen Blake (née Squires), herself the youngest of 10 children of the director of the General Register Office, Dublin. His paternal grandmother was a Butler, leading Frank Day-Lewis to claim descent from the House of Ormonde and his son to think of himself as a possible relation of W.B. Yeats. His maternal grandmother was a direct descendant of an uncle of Oliver Goldsmith. In later life Day Lewis also liked to recall that he was descended from the Eyres of Eyrecourt, co. Galway (it gave him particular pleasure that an ancestor in this line was called Jane).

The family name originated in 1863 when Day Lewis's paternal grandfather and a brother became the heirs of their childless uncle Frank Lewis (a wholesale perfumier),and added his surname to their own. Day Lewis came to dislike his conspicuously middle-class 1st name and never used it in public after 1927. At the same time he dropped the hyphen, which he regarded as a product of snobbery; this was a matter of usage and did not involve a legal name change. In the last decade of his life, Day Lewis, who described himself as too lazy for genealogical research, developed the mistaken belief – derived from his friend, Irish-American academic John Kelleher – that ‘Day’ was an anglicisation of the Gaelic Clare name Ó Deaghaidhe or O'Dea (the family was in fact of Kentish origin). He therefore resumed the ‘Day-Lewis’ form; his children have used both forms, but predominantly prefer ‘Day-Lewis’.

Youth and education

The family moved to England when Cecil was aged 18 months, apparently because his father thought his prospects would be brighter in the Church of England. 2 years later Kathleen died of lymphoma, after which her sister Agnes Squires (nicknamed ‘Knos’) came over from Dublin to keep house for her widowed brother-in-law. There is some dispute about how far Day Lewis regarded Agnes as a substitute mother, but they retained a lifelong fondness for each other, and he saw her as having given up whatever chance she had of marriage and children to care for him. (There was no possibility that she might marry Frank; the anglican church forbade marriage to a deceased wife's sister.)

Since the ambitious Rev. Day-Lewis consciously distanced himself from his own large extended family, Cecil's continuing contact with Ireland came through Knos. Every year between 1908 and 1914 Cecil and Knos spent summer holidays at Monart Rectory, near Enniscorthy, co. Wexford, where her unmarried brother William Squires was rector (1908–44); another sister, Alice, kept house for him. Day Lewis developed there a fondness for rural life and for music, and recalled it as foundational in his sensuous education. Knos was a trained singer with a liking for the Irish melodies of Thomas Moore; he also learned Irish patriotic ballads from a friendly gardener, and these frequently appear at incongruous points in his detective stories.

Monart was vital to Day Lewis's sense of himself as Irish and his retention of an Irish accent, although his self-identification as Irish also reflected enthusiasm for Yeats and a lifelong need to see himself as an outsider; he wrote that he at once yearned for roots and dreaded them. This ambivalence had its basis in Day Lewis's relationship with his father, whom he initially hero-worshipped but later came to see as smothering.

As part of his adolescent self-definition the young Day Lewis expressed support for Sinn Féin during the War of Independence period (though he also described this as no more deeply thought through than his habitual support for the Irish rugby team in international matches). He retained a mild lifelong fascination with Michael Collins, which may derive from newspaper coverage at this time.

In 1921 Knos returned to Ireland to keep house for William Squires after Alice died (partly as a result of the shock of an IRA arms raid on the rectory) and Rev. Day-Lewis remarried. In 1944 Knos and Rev. Squires retired to Monkstown, co. Dublin, where the latter died in 1955. Day Lewis retained contact with Knos throughout her life; he paid occasional visits to Wexford in the early 1920s and it was at Monart in 1924 that he became engaged to his 1st wife. Knos expressed grief at his abandonment of the anglican faith, to which she remained devoutly attached, and at his divorce and remarriage. After her death in December 1966 (following a long period of senile confusion in a Rathmines nursing home) Day Lewis wrote a poem asking why, if the God whom she revered actually existed, He had allowed her to suffer so much. ‘If she was not a saint, I do not know / What saints are ...’ (‘My mother's sister’, in The room, 1965).

Day Lewis was educated at Wilkie's preparatory school, London, and at Sherborne School, where he began his long connection with Dorset and grew dissatisfied with anglicanism.

He entered Wadham College, Oxford, in 1923. At university he studied classics, later recalling the ‘moodiness and fitful enthusiasm and the rudeness to which his cult of intellectual honesty could lead him’.

Early career and radicalism

After graduation Day Lewis became a schoolmaster, securing a position at Summerfields School, Oxford, with the assistance of Anglo-Irish writer L.A.G. Strong, 1 of several Anglo-Irish friends whom he attracted throughout his life. On 27 December 1928 he married Mary Constance King, with whom he was to have 2 sons, and was appointed assistant master at Larchfield School, Helensburgh, near Glasgow.

At Oxford he fell under the influence of W.H. Auden, and during the 1930s he was regarded as 1 of the ‘pylon poets’ or ‘social poets’, reacting against the cultural conservatism of Stanley Baldwin's Britain and the elitist modernism of T.S. Eliot. This group, lampooned by right-wing poet Roy Campbell as ‘MacSpaunday’ (Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Auden, and Day Lewis) combined treatment of working-class and technological subjects with sympathy for communism as offering hope for a better and more just society than Depression-era Britain; from the mid-1930s this was reinforced by a sense that communism offered the only hope of effective resistance to fascism. Day Lewis, who came to be seen as the most politically doctrinaire of the group and provided its manifesto – A Hope for Poetry (1936) – was influenced by industrial conditions around his father's rectory at Edwinstowe in the Nottinghamshire coalfield and reaction against the stifling Victorian conservatism of his father and stepmother.

Day Lewis's radicalism was frowned on by the governors of Cheltenham College, where he taught, 1930–1935). A lecture to the Friends of the Soviet Union led to his being summoned before the board; a governor commented, in a manner Day Lewis found reminiscent of fascism, that anyone in his regiment who expressed such views would have been savaged by the junior officers, then forced to resign.

The governors were further irritated in 1935 when Lewis published, under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, A question of proof, a murder mystery set in a public school in which the detective, Nigel Strangeways, is based on Auden, an adulterous romance involving the wife of a headmaster is depicted with great sympathy (Day Lewis had to assure the governors that this aspect of the plot was not autobiographical; fortunately he received the support of the headmaster), and the murderer suffers from sexually driven religious mania.

This excursion into genre fiction was inspired by the thought that, since he had read many detective stories – he wrote a regular column on new titles for the Spectator – he might be able to write a detective novel himself. He published 19 further Nicholas Blake novels at intervals throughout his life, 16 featuring detective Nigel Strangeways; their success, with the assistance of a contract committing him to publish 3 literary novels in 3 years, allowed him to leave the teaching profession and become a full-time professional writer.

Flirtation with Communism

Day Lewis joined the Communist Party in 1936 and remained a member until 1939. While the decision in 1936 of the Irish Academy of Letters not to admit Day Lewis (reversed in 1968) was influenced by his political views, and although MI5 opened a file on him, his radicalism was short-lived; he was ambivalent about submitting to the authority of the Communist Party and felt increasing disquiet at the activities of the Russian Stalinist regime. In August 1938 he moved his family to Musbury, a remote village in Devon near the Dorset boundary. This led him to drop out of his party activities; his disquiet was crystallised by the Hitler–Stalin pact, and the Russian invasion of Finland in winter 1939 led to his final defection.

Day Lewis came to believe Marxism was fatally flawed by the view that any action could be justified if it advanced the cause of revolution – a view which in his opinion made human relations impossible by leading the true believer to treat other human beings as means rather than ends. In later years he maintained an ambivalent attitude towards his former activities, declaring that most of the causes involved had been righteous but that he was not the right person to engage in such political action. It has been suggested that he retained his political faith longer than his associates precisely because he lived a relatively sheltered life: while Auden and Spender revelled in Weimar Berlin, Day Lewis spent his first weekend outside Britain or Ireland when he visited Paris in 1938 and did not undertake a lengthy foreign visit until 1947.

It has also been remarked that he and the other pylon poets were considerably assisted in their careers by the social and intellectual formations which they denounced so vigorously, and that Day Lewis maintained a certain detachment from his proletarian comrades even as he romanticised them. It should be noted, however, that he continued to regard himself as a left-liberal (he was a consistent Labour voter after breaking with communism), that in the early 1950s he was prepared to join communist-linked peace movements, and that he was nearly refused a US visa because he thought it unnecessary to make an explicit public renunciation of his former commitments. His mood hardened after the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, bitterly recalled in the Nicholas Blake novel The sad variety (1964). Day Lewis also retained for the rest of his life a concern for the social role and function of poetry and a concern to explain its significance.

World War II and after

After the outbreak of the war, Day Lewis took a leading role in the local home guard; during the summer of 1940 he lived in hourly expectation of having to fight a delaying action against German invasion forces. Some years later, when he had to choose whether to obtain an Irish or a British passport, he decided to opt for British citizenship because he saw his experiences in 1940 as showing where his deepest roots lay.

In the spring of 1941, however, he moved to London to undertake war duties in the Ministry of Information, thus beginning his drift away from Dorset and reintegration into metropolitan literary circles. Although his exemption from the armed forces provoked some jeering from enemies, Day Lewis in fact faced considerable risks by his presence in London during the Blitz. He remained at the ministry until 30 September 1946, when he became chief reader at the publishing firm of Chatto & Windus; this was his principal employment in later life, and he eventually served on the firm's board. In 1941 he also began to broadcast on BBC radio, which provided a significant source of revenue in the 1940s and 1950s.

There was another source of this distancing from Dorset. Shortly after moving to the West Country, Day Lewis embarked on a fiercely carnal affair with Edna ‘Billie’ Currell, the wife of a neighbouring farmer. This produced a son, William Currell (born 1940), who was brought up as the child of his mother's husband. (Billie and Day Lewis retained sporadic contact thereafter, and it is possible that another of her younger children, John (born 1947), was also his son.) Day Lewis believed that this affair marked his breakthrough to full maturity which, together with the experience of wartime solidarity, opened a powerful new vein of poetic creativity. He remembered it as the time when he had felt most intensely alive, and as late as 1968 he memorialised it in the Irish-set Nicholas Blake novel The private wound. At the same time the affair began the final breakdown of his marriage, and he remained aware of the pain it imposed on both families. (2 Blake novels contain apprehensive imaginings of a neglected illegitimate child turned vengeful psychopath.)

Day Lewis's reintegration into London literary life amid the dangers and intensities of the Blitz was accompanied from May 1941 by an intense affair with novelist Rosamond Lehmann (1901-1990), who helped significantly to broaden his aesthetic horizons; she introduced him to European travel after the war, and he responded with enthusiasm. His poetry collection An Italian visit (1953) was inspired by Lehmann, who delayed its publication by initially refusing permission to publish it after their break-up.

The affair with Lehmann brought considerable unhappiness both to his wife and to Lehmann, who saw him as the love of her life and obtained a divorce in the hope of marrying him; he spent considerable time at her mansion house in the Thames Valley and her daughter regarded him as a father figure. Day Lewis vacillated between the two women, telling Lehmann that he would divorce Mary when the children were grown up, while Mary still hoped he could be persuaded to return.

In 1949, displaying a mixture of guilt and ruthlessness, he left both women for actress Jill Balcon, whom he married on 27 April 1951. With her he had a daughter (television producer Tamsin Day-Lewis, born 1953) and a son (actor Daniel Day-Lewis, born 1957), named after Daniel O'Connell in tribute to his father's Irish roots and after the Old Testament prophet in honour of his mother's Jewish descent.

In later years Day Lewis had a succession of intimate friendships with younger women, not always sexual; while he spoke of them as having been his ‘mistresses’, the term may have been used metaphorically, and some of them later explicitly denied having had sexual relations with him. Some family members believed that he tended to portray former mistresses as murder victims in the Blake novels. In several the murderer reflects aspects of the author's personality; 2 of them feature writers who are inadvertently stimulated to their highest peaks of creativity by participating in murders.

Day Lewis's poetic output, though its sheer quantity often led to unevenness and repetition, and the success of critical works aimed at making the craft of poetry accessible to a wider audience (notably The Poetic Image, 1947) brought increasing acceptance and recognition, and he developed into an elder statesman of literature. He was Clark lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1946 and professor of poetry at Oxford (1951–6); in this he narrowly defeated C.S. Lewis, whom he privately described as ‘Slogger C. Screwtape Lewis’ (Sean Day-Lewis, 203), as the result of a campaign reflecting tensions between Christian and unbelieving academics which was possibly decided by confusion between 2 similarly named candidates.

Later he was Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry at Harvard (1964=1965), and Compton lecturer at Hull University (1968).

In 1960 he was a defence witness in the Lady Chatterley's lover trial. He translated the work of Virgil during the Festival of Britain and gave many literary broadcasts and poetry readings.

In 1967 Day Lewis was appointed poet laureate of England; he already acted as a stand-in for his predecessor, John Masefield (1878–1967)). He hoped to use the post to popularise poetry, but these hopes were restricted by age and increasing ill health.

In 1960 Day Lewis published a memoir of his childhood and youth, The Buried Day; in 1962 he produced The Gate and other poems, followed by the poetry collections The Room (1965) and The whispering roots (1970).

His last decade was marked by an increasing emphasis on his Irish roots and a corresponding intensification of his Irish accent. Motives for this turn of events included curiosity about his formative experiences as his elder relatives died off and witnessing the childhood of his 2nd family (whom he took on annual holidays in the west of Ireland from 1964) as well as a desire to preserve some degree of outsider status amid his increasing official acceptance.

In 1971 Day Lewis was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

On 7 March 1972 the mortally ill Day Lewis was one of 27 signatories of a letter to the London Times calling for an end to internment in Northern Ireland.

He died 22 May 1972 at the Hertfordshire home of writers Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard (a former lover of his). He was buried near the grave of Thomas Hardy in Stinsford churchyard, Dorset.

His Collected poems were published by his widow in 1992.

Writing

Novels

Of his "Nicholas Blake" stories, Child of misfortune (1939), in which Day Lewis's experiences are divided between 2 brothers from an Anglo-Irish background, has the strongest Irish content; his friend Elizabeth Bowen thought it started well but fell to pieces about half-way through. It shows noticeable ambivalence towards Irishness – ‘an incompleteness, a melancholy, a conflict never to be resolved, the cruelty beneath that sharpness, the softness slurring over a quality of indecision ... a brilliant paradox concealing an abysmal falsehood’, and includes a scene in which a character based on Rev. William Squires is killed by the IRA under circumstances resembling the death in 1921 of the loyalist Mrs Lindsay.

Day Lewis always made it clear that he did not regard the Nicholas Blake novels as serious works of art, but that they should not be dismissed as purely commercial. He used them to explore certain morbid psychological states, such as paranoia and the sadistic desire to dominate and control, and to continue his central project of self-analysis.

Although he knew the detective story was deeply shaped by the conservative expectations of its middle-class audience, some early Blake titles contain subversive undercurrents. There's trouble brewing (1937) features an exploitative provincial businessman whose entire life is described as a series of legalised crimes, while The smiler with the knife (1939) depicts a nationwide fascist conspiracy combining the aristocratic nostalgia of the ruralist ‘English Mistery’ with the ruthlessness, organisational skills, and financial resources of the French cagoulards. The Blake novels’ explorations of paranoid egotism often contain implicit or explicit references to the fascist dictators. These works are also of interest for their occasional use of Irish subject matter at a time when this rarely featured in Day Lewis's poetry (the second Blake novel, Thou shell of death (1936), features a character based on T.E. Lawrence with an admixture of Michael Collins) and, in later titles, for their concealed exploration of some of the author's own experiences.

Day Lewis also published 2 children's novels under his own name, Dick Willoughby (1933) and The Otterbury incident (1948).

Poetry

Day Lewis was a prolific poet from an early age; his earliest collections were Beechen vigil (1925) and Country courts (1928). His early work was Georgian-style pastoral with classicist influences.

Day Lewis's political concerns are reflected in such collections as From feathers to iron (1931), The magnetic mountain (1933), Noah and the waters (a 1936 mystery play in which Noah's decision to sail out upon the waters is allegorically equated with the decision to commit oneself to left-wing politics; Day Lewis later repudiated this work, believing his political commitment had in this instance led him to produce substandard verse), and Overtures to death (1938). These works were praised as offering a new style for a new age and for their vigorous use of language and metrical variety; some critics, however, claimed that they displayed intellectual aplomb and technical virtuosity at the expense of emotional intensity. Critic Geoffrey Grigson, who developed a lifelong hatred for Day Lewis, complained that the modernity of his subject matter disguised his formal conservatism.

The preoccupation with the divided self found in these volumes was a common denominator of radical poetry in the 1930s and reflected not only Day Lewis's own political and personal crises, but also both his yearning for certainty – he later wrote that he might have turned to Rome instead of Moscow had he not been inoculated against catholicism by his Irish protestant background – and a sense that he always kept something in reserve.

His 1940-1941 experience in the home guard led him to produce a best-selling translation of Virgil's Georgics as a tribute to the spirit of rural rootedness which he saw as embodied in his men, reflecting also the emergence of Hardy and Wordsworth as his major poetic models.

Always catholic in his literary tastes, during the war period Day Lewis explored new poetic models and experimented with many poetic modes. His poetry moved away from political preoccupations to become more personal and was expressed in sharper detail. Such collections as World over All (1943) and Poems, 1943–47 (1957) deal with conflicts between sexual and parental love, personal destiny, and responses to physical experience.

Many late poems deal with his parents, relatives, and upbringing and with the 1916 rising (the 1966 commemoration of which he attended). A sympathetic poem on the history and undying faith of Ballintubber Abbey was issued in a limited edition to raise funds for its maintenance; his Irish-set novel The private wound (1968), which combines a shaky grasp of 1930s Irish politics and society with a portrayal of a blackthorn-wielding priest whose sincere belief that the fate of immortal souls justifies extreme punishment of the body, is treated by this self-confessedly churchy agnostic with surprising respect.

Critical reputation

Day Lewis's reputation suffered greater eclipse than any of his 1930s associates. Younger poets, such as those associated with the The Movement in the 1950s, increasingly tended to see him as an establishment figure; Eavan Boland – quoted by ocial and cultural historian Stefan Collini – spoke of him writing regretfully in rosewater.

Day Lewis himself believed that he had fallen just short of greatness – a B+ brain with a B++ literary talent – and would be remembered if at all by a few poems from the late 1940s and early 1950s. He was widely accused of being a pasticheur, though he maintained that he extended his literary models rather than merely imitating them.

While his later verse has some critical defenders (notably his eldest son and biographer Sean Day-Lewis) most critics favour his work of the 1940s, though his popular image is as a poet of the 1930s. Collini has presented him as aspiring to become the ‘Virgil of the Third Programme’; in his fluid identity, genuine though easily overlooked political commitments, lyric wistfulness, contemporary cachet, and unease about the value of poetry – his own included – he might also be compared to Thomas Moore, whose songs he loved from childhood.

Recognition

Day Lewis became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1944, was a member of its council from 1954 and vice-president from 1959, and was made a Companion of Literaturein 1965).

He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in June 1950.,

In 1966 he was appointed an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He was an honorary fellow of Wadham College and received honorary degrees of D.Litt. from the universities of Exeter and Hull as well as from Trinity College, Dublin.

He was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1951 to 1956.

He was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1968, in succession to John Masefield, and served until his death in 1972.

In popular culture

Orson Welles bought an option on the Nicholas Blake novel The Smiler with the Knife, before filming Citizen Kane, thinking of adapting it to an American setting and turning the fascist leader into a portrait of Howard Hughes.

Another early Blake novel, The Beast Must Die (1938 – his best-seller; it sold 300,000 copies in America and 130,000 in Britain), was filmed by Claude Chabrol in 1969; it was transferred to a contemporary French setting but retained its jaundiced portrayal of bourgeois domesticity.

Publications

Poetry

• Beechen Vigil, and other poems. Fortune Press, 1925.
• Country Comets, 1928.
• Transitional Poem. Hogarth, 1929.
• From Feathers to Iron. Hogarth, 1932.
• The Magnetic Mountain. Hogarth, 1933.
• Collected Poems, 1929-1933. Hogarth, 1935; 2nd edition, 1945.
• A Time to Dance, and other poems. Hogarth, 1935.
• Overtures to Death, and other poems. London: Cape, 1938.
• Poems in Wartime. London: Cape, 1940.
• Selected Poems. Hogarth, 1940
  • revised edition, Penguin, 1969.
• Word Over All. London: Cape, 1943; Transatlantic, 1944.
• Short is the Time: Poems, 1936-1943 (previously published as Overtures to Death, and other poems and Word Over All). New York: Oxford University Press, 1945.
• Collected Poems, 1929-1936. Hogarth, 1948.
• Poems, 1943-1947. Oxford University Press, 1948.
• An Italian Visit (narrative poem). Harper, 1953.
• Collected Poems. London: Cape, 1954
  • published as Collected Poems, 1954, 1970.
• Pegasus, and other poems. London: Cape, 1957, Harper, 1958.
• The Newborn: D.M.B., 29th April, 1957. Favil Press of Kensington, 1957.
• The Gate, and other poems. London: Cape, 1962.
• Requiem for the Living. Harper, 1964.
• On Not Saying Anything. privately printed, 1964.
• The Room, and other poems. London: Cape, 1965.
• A Marriage Song for Albert and Barbara. privately printed, 1965.
• Selected Poems. Harper, 1967
  • revised edition, Penguin, 1969.
• Selections from His Poetry (edited by Patric Dickinson). London: Chatto & Windus, 1967.
• The Abbey That Refused to Die: A poem. Ballintubber Abbey, 1967.
• The Whispering Roots, and other poems. Harper, 1970
  • published in UK as The Whispering Roots. London: Cape, 1970.
• Poems of C. Day Lewis (edited by Ian Parson). London: Cape, 1970.
• Posthumous Poems (leather bound facsimiles), (introduction by Jill Balcon). Andoversford, England: Whittington Press, 1979.
• Complete Poems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.

Play

• Noah and the Waters (modern morality play). London: Hogarth, 1936.

Novels

• The Friendly Tree. London: Cape, 1936; New York: Harper, 1937.
• Starting Point. London: Cape, 1937; New York: Harper, 1938.
• Child of Misfortune. London: Cape, 1939.

As "Nicholas Blake"

• A Question of Proof. Harper, 1935.
• Shell of Death. Harper, 1936 (
  • published in England as Thou Shell of Death. Collins, 1936).
• There's Trouble Brewing. Harper, 1937.
• The Beast Must Die. Harper, 1938.
• The Smiler With the Knife. Harper, 1939.
• The Summer Camp Mystery. Harper, 1940
  • published in UK as Malice in Wonderland. Collins, 1940
  • American paperback edition published as Malice with Murder
• The Corpse in the Snowman, Harper, 1941
  • published in UK as The Case of the Abominable Snowman. Collins, 1941.
• Minute for Murder. Harper, 1947.
• Head of a Traveler. Harper, 1949.
• The Dreadful Hollow. Harper, 1953.
• The Whisper in the Gloom. Harper, 1954
  • also published as Catch and Kill
• A Tangled Web. Harper, 1956
  • also published as Death and Daisy Bland
• End of Chapter. Harper, 1957.
• A Penknife in My Heart. Collins, 1958, Harper, 1959.
• The Widow's Cruise. Harper, 1959.
• The Worm of Death. Harper, 1961.
• The Deadly Joker. Collins, 1963.
• The Sad Variety. Harper, 1964.
• The Morning after Death. Collins, 1966.
• The Nicholas Blake Omnibus. Collins, 1966.
• The Private Wound. Harper, 1968.

Non-fiction

• A Hope for Poetry (criticism). Basil Blackwell, 1934
  • reprinted with a postscript, Folcroft, 1969.
• Revolution in Writing (commentary). Hogarth, 1935.
• We're Not Going to Do Nothing (commentary). Left Review, 1936.
• Imagination and Thinking (with L.S. Stebbing). Life and Leisure, 1936.
• The Poetic Image (criticism). Oxford University Press, 1947.
• Enjoying Poetry. Cambridge University Press for National Book League, 1947.
• The Colloquial Element in English Poetry (criticism). Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1947.
• The Poet's Task (criticism). Clarendon Press, 1951.
• The Grand Manner (criticism), University of Nottingham, 1952.
• The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy (criticism). Oxford University Press, 1953; Folcroft, 1970.
• Christmas Eve. Faber, 1954.
• Notable Images of Virtue: Emily Bronte, George Meredith, W. B. Yeats. Ryerson, 1954.
• The Poet's Way of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press, 1957.
• The Buried Day (autobiography). Harper, 1960.
• The Lyric Impulse (Charles Eliot Norton lectures). Harvard University Press, 1965.
• Thomas Hardy (with R.A. Scott-James) (criticism). Longman, 1965.
• A Need for Poetry? University of Hull, 1968.
• On Translating Poetry: A lecture. Abbey Press, 1970.
• Going My Way. [London], 1970.

Juvenile

• Dick Willoughby (fiction). Basil Blackwell, 1933; Random House, 1938.
• Poetry for You: A book for boys and girls on the enjoyment of poetry. Basil Blackwell, 1944; New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.
• The Otterbury Incident (adaptation of the French film Nous le gosses, released in England as Us Kids). Putnam, 1948; reissued, 1963.

Collected editions

• Collected Poems, 1929-1933 / A Hope For Poetry. New York; Random House, 1935.
• A Time to Dance / Noah and the Waters / Revolution in Writing. New York: Random House, 1936.

Translated

• Virgil, Georgics. London: Cape, 1940.
• Paul Valery, Le Cimetiere marin. Secker & Warburg, 1947.
• Virgil, Aeneid. Oxford University Press, 1952; Doubleday Anchor, 1953.
• Virgil, Eclogues. London: Cape, 1963.
• Virgil, The Eclogues and Georgics. Doubleday Anchor, 1964
  • published in UK as The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid. Oxford University Press, 1966.
• Erzsi Gazdas, The Tomtit in the Rain: Traditional Hungarian rhymes (With Matyas Sarkozi). London: Chatto & Windus, 1971.

Edited

• Oxford Poetry (edited with W.H. Auden). Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1927-32.
• The Mind in Chains: Socialism and the cultural revolution. Muller, 1937; Folcroft, PA: Folcroft, 1972.
• Ralph Fox: Writer in Arms (edited with John Lehmann, T.A. Jackson Fox, & Ralph Winston). International Publishers, 1937.
• Anatomy of Oxford: An anthology (edited with Charles Fenby). Cape, 1938.
• An Anthology of Modern Verse, 1920-1940 (also published as A New Anthology of Modern Verse, 1920-1940) (edited with L.A.G. Strong). Methuen, 1941.
• The Echoing Green: An anthology of verse (3 volumes). Basil Blackwell, 1941-1943..
• Orion(With others) Nicholson & Watson, Volume II, 1945, Volume III, 1946.
• Francis T. Palgrave, The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language. Collins, 1954.
• The Chatto Book of Modern Poetry, 1915-1955 (edited with John Lehmann). Chatto & Windus, 1956.
• Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Collins, 1956.
• New Poems, 1957 (edited with Kathleen Nott & Thomas Blackburn). M. Joseph, 1957.
• Wilfred Owen, Collected Poems (amended edition; editor and author of introduction and notes). New Directions, 1954.
• English Lyric Poems, 1500-1900. Appleton, 1961.
  • published in England as A Book of English Lyrics. Chatto & Windus, 1961.
• Edmund Blunden, The Midnight Skaters: Poems for young readers (editor and author of introduction). Bodley Head, 1968.
• Robert Browning,Poems. Cambridge, UK: Limited Editions Club, 1969; Heritage Press, 1971.
• John Keats, A Choice of Keats's Verse. Faber, 1971.
• George Crabbe, Crabbe. Penguin, 1973.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Audio / video

Walking Away by Cecil Day-Lewis

Cecil Day Lewis reads four of his poems

• C. Day Lewis: Reads from his own works (LP). New York: Carillon, 1961; New York: Decca, 1965.
• The Voice and Pen of C. Day Lewis, Poet Laureate (LP). London: Saga, 1968.
• The Poetry of C. Day Lewis (LP). New York: Spoken Arts, 1971.
• C. Day Lewis (LP). London: Argo (British Poets of Our Time), 1973.
• C. Day Lewis: A collection of his own poetry (cassette). Cheltenham, UK: Talking Tape, 1981.

Except where noted, discographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets

Preceded by Maurice Bowra

Oxford Professor of Poetry 1951-1956

Succeeded by W.H. Auden

Preceded by John Masefield

Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom 1967-1972

Succeeded by John Betjeman

References

• Sean Day-Lewis, Cecil Day-Lewis: An English literary life (1980)
• Alfred Gelpi, Living in Time: The poetry of C. Day Lewis (1998)
• Patrick Maume, "Lewis, Cecil Day (Nicholas Blake)," Irish Dictionary of Biography, October 2009. Web, Jul. 26, 2022.
• Peter Stanford, C Day-Lewis: A life (2007)

External links

Poems

• "The Volunteer - An ode to the International Brigade"
• Cecil Day-Lewis 1904-1972 at the Poetry Foundation
• Cecil Day-Lewis at Poetry Nook (4 poems)
• The Poems (13 poems)

Audio/video

• Day-Lewis' poem 'Newsreel' read over footage from 1930s Pathe newsreels
• Cecil Day Lewis at YouTube
• Recordings of interviews at BBC 4 website (Realplayer required)

Books

• C. Day Lewis at Amazon.com
• C. Day Lewis, A Revised Bibliography, 1929-39 and Index of MSS Locations with Introductory Notes by Nick Watson, (a 65 page booklet, Radged Press, 2003)

About

• C. Day-Lewis in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Cecil Day-Lewis at NNDB
• Cecil Day-Lewis at the Internet Movie Database
• C. Day-Lewis Official website

This article incorporates text from the Dictionary of Irish Biography, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license. Original article is at: Lewis, Cecil Day (Nicholas Blake)