(b Peckham Rye, London, 29 Jan 1845; d London, 18 April 1910). English designer and writer. He was educated in France and Germany, but his interest in design was provided by visits to the South Kensington Museum, London (now the Victoria & Albert Museum). In 1865 he entered the office of Lavers & Barraud, glass painters and designers. Some time later he became keeper of cartoons at Clayton & Bell and by 1870 had joined Heaton, Butler & Bayne, for whom he worked on the decoration of Eaton Hall, Ches. In late 1880 Day started his own business designing textiles, wallpapers, stained glass, embroidery, carpets, tiles, pottery, furniture, silver, jewellery and book covers. He designed tiles for Maw & Co. and Pilkington's Tile and Pottery Co., stained glass and wallpaper for W. B. Simpson & Co., wallpapers for Jeffrey & Co. and textiles for Turnbull & Stockdale where he was made Art Director in 1881.

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The British poet, essayist, and detective story writer Cecil Day Lewis (1904-1972) regarded himself as a voice of revolution, both poetic and political, taking as a necessary starting point the "certainty of new life."

Born on April 27, 1904, in Ballin togher, Ireland, C. Day Lewis was the only child of the Rev. F. C. Day Lewis. When Cecil was 4, his mother died and the family moved to England. He was educated at Sherborne School on a scholarship and was an exhibitioner at Wadham College, Oxford. Of necessity he taught at various schools until 1935, when he began to give full time to writing, editing, and political activity. During the 1930s he was a friend of W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, sharing their leftist political views.

Lewis had written poetry seriously since he was 6 and in 1927 had been coeditor of Oxford Poetry. But his financial independence was achieved through his detective stories, which have been highly praised and have been regarded by some critics as achievements on a par with his poetry. He said of them that they release "a spring of cruelty" that is in all men.

During 1941-1946 Lewis was editor of books and pamphlets for the Ministry of Information. In 1946 he was appointed Clark lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1951 professor of poetry at Oxford. He has been said to have mellowed by this time and abandoned the revolutionary direction of his early work, with some loss of force. In 1964-1965 he was the Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry at Harvard. After 1962 he was a member of the Arts Council; he was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts.

Throughout his career Lewis published poetry, an increasing amount of criticism, and detective stories signed Nicholas Blake. In 1964 he edited the amended edition of one of his spiritual ancestors-The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. His publications are too numerous to list or to discuss here. The reader may want to explore first what has appeared in standard anthologies and in Lewis's own collections: Collected Poems, 1935; Short Is the Time (poetry from 1936 to 1943), 1945; Poems, 1943-47, 1948; Collected Poems, 1954; The Gate, and Other Poems, 1962; Requiem for the Living, 1964; and The Room, and Other Poems, 1965. For his critical views, one may look at Revolution in Writing, 1935; The Poet's Task, 1951; The Poet's Way of Knowledge, 1957; and The Lyric Impulse, 1965. Louis Untermeyer has said that the essays in Lewis's A Hope for Poetry (1934) are "by far the best analysis of recent poetry that has yet appeared."

In 1968 Lewis was appointed poet laureate. He died in London on May 22, 1972.

Further Reading

Lewis's autobiography is The Buried Day (1960). A book-length study is Clifford Dyment, C. Day Lewis (1944; 2d ed. 1963). See also Derek Stanford, Pylon Poets: MacNeice, Spender, Day-Lewis (1969).

For more information on Cecil Day-Lewis, visit Britannica.com.

(1845-1910)

An important figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain, Day's early design work was in glass painting and design. Having built up experience working for three different companies from 1865 to 1870 he established his own stained glass business in London. Within a short time he developed a reputation for surface pattern in a range of media including wallpapers for W. B. Simpson & Co., textiles for Turnbull & Stockdale, and tile designs for both Maws and Pilkingtons. He was an active member of the Art Workers' Guild and a founder member of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, as well as a stalwart member of the Council of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) for much of the period between 1877 and his death in 1910. His 1886 series of Cantor Lectures on ‘Ornamental Design’ for the RSA sparked off a number of influential publications, including the Anatomy of Pattern (1887), The Planning of Ornament (1887), Pattern Design (1903), Ornament and its Application (1904), and Nature and Ornament (1908-9). Day also played a significant role in the education sector, serving as an examiner for the Department of Science and Art and later the Board of Education as well as lecturing at the Royal College of Art. He was a prolific writer for a wide range of journals, including the Magazine of Art, the Art Journal, and the Journal of Decorative Art. In addition to other more substantial publications such as Windows (1897) and Stained Glass (1903), he also wrote on Alphabets Old and New (1898) and Lettering in Ornament (1902). His influence was also felt in the arrangement of the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum when it was established in the new building in 1909, having served on the consultative committee.

Day-Lewis, C[ecil] (1904-1972), poet; born in Ballintubbert, Co. Laois, he was educated at Sherborne and Oxford. His first collections, Beechen Vigil (1925) and Country Comets (1928), reveal the strong influence of Yeats. At Oxford he met W. H. Auden; and he, Auden, Stephen Spender, and Louis MacNeice became the left-wing ‘MacSpaunday poets’. Beginning with Transitional Poem (1929), a political vein runs through his collections of the 1930s: From Feathers to Iron (1931), The Magnetic Mountain (1933), A Time to Dance (1935), Noah and the Waters (1936), and Overtures to Death (1938). In 1935 he published the first of a series of popular detective novels under the pseudonym ‘Nicholas Blake’. A conflict between sexual and parental love finds expression in World Over All (1943), Poems 1943-47 (1948), An Italian Visit (1953), and Pegasus (1957). From 1951 to 1956 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and was Poet Laureate from 1968. The Buried Day (1960) is an autobiography. His final collection, The Whispering Roots (1970), explores his own identity.

(Cecil Day Lewis), 1904–72, English author, b. Ireland. While he was still at Oxford, he became associated with a group of leftist poets led by W. H. Auden. After graduation he taught at various schools until 1935 and then decided to devote himself to writing. He was professor of poetry at Oxford from 1951 to 1956. Included among his volumes of poetry are Collected Poems 1929–1933 (1935), Overtures to Death (1938), Short Is the Time (1945), Collected Poems (1954), Pegasus and Other Poems (1957), and The Whispering Roots and Other Poems (1970). Lewis was a member of the Communist party from 1935 to 1938, and his early poetry is marked by didacticism and a preoccupation with social themes. His later work, however, is more personal and metaphysical. Besides poetry, C. Day Lewis is noted for the collection of essays A Hope for Poetry (1934); for a verse translation of Vergil's Aeneid (1952); and for detective stories written under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake. From 1967 to 1972 he was poet laureate of Great Britain.

Bibliography

See his autobiography, The Buried Day (1960); biography by J. N. Riddel (1971).

Quotes:

"How selfhood begins with a walking away, and love is proved in the letting go."

"First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand."

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