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Cecil Day-Lewis

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Cecil Day-Lewis
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(born April 27, 1904, Ballintubbert, County Leix, Ire. — died May 22, 1972, Hadley Wood, Hertfordshire, Eng.) Irish-born British poet. Son of a clergyman, Day-Lewis studied at the University of Oxford and in the 1930s became part of a circle of left-wing poets centred on W.H. Auden, though he later turned to an individual lyricism expressed in traditional forms. His works include translations of Virgil's Georgics (1940), Aeneid (1952), and Eclogues (1963) and the verse collections The Room (1965) and The Whispering Roots (1970). He also wrote the autobiography The Buried Day (1960) and several detective novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake. He became poet laureate of England in 1968. He was the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

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Biography: Cecil Day Lewis
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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).

Irish Literature Companion: Cecil Day-Lewis
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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.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: C. Day Lewis
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Day Lewis, C. (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 By: Cecil Day Lewis
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Quotes:

"We'd like to fight but we fear defeat, we'd like to work but we're feeling too weak, we'd like to be sick but we'd get the sack, we'd like to behave, we'd like to believe, we'd like to love, but we've lost the knack."

"We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand."

Wikipedia: Cecil Day-Lewis
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Cecil Day-Lewis
Born 27 April 1904 (1904-04-27)
Ballintubbert, Queen's County, Ireland
Died 22 May 1972 (1972-05-23) (aged 68)
Hadley Wood, Hertfordshire, England
Pen name Nicholas Blake
Occupation Poet, Novelist
Genres [1]
Spouse(s) Constance Mary King (1928-1951)
Jill Balcon (1951-1972)
Children Tamasin Day-Lewis (b. 1953)
Daniel Day-Lewis (b. 1957)

Cecil Day-Lewis (or Day Lewis) CBE (27 April 1904 – 22 May 1972) was an Irish-born poet, as well as Poet Laureate for Britain between 1968 to 1972, and, under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, a mystery writer. He is the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis and documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.

Contents

Personal life

Day-Lewis was born in Ballintubber, Queen's County (now County Laois), Ireland. He was the son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis (December, 1872 – 19 April 1938) and Kathleen Squires. After Day-Lewis's mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. Day-Lewis continued to regard himself as "Anglo-Irish" for the remainder of his life, though after the declaration of the Republic of Ireland in 1948 he chose British rather than Irish citizenship, on the grounds that 1940 had taught him where his deepest roots lay. He was educated at Sherborne School and at Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927.

In 1928 he married Mary King, the daughter of a Sherborne master (i.e. teacher), and worked as a schoolmaster in three schools.[1] During the 1940s he had a long and troubled love affair with the novelist Rosamund Lehmann. His second marriage was to actress Jill Balcon.

Headstone of Cecil Day-Lewis in the Stinsford churchyard.

During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, an institution satirised by George Orwell in his dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, but equally based on Orwell's experience of the BBC.

After the war, he joined publisher Chatto & Windus as a director and senior editor. In 1946, Day-Lewis was a lecturer at Cambridge University, publishing his lectures in The Poetic Image (1947). In 1951, he married the actress Jill Balcon, daughter of Michael Balcon. He later taught poetry at Oxford, where he was Professor of Poetry from 1951-1956.[1] From 1962-1963 Day-Lewis was the Norton Professor at Harvard University.

Day-Lewis's two marriages yielded five children, including Academy Award-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis, food writer and journalist Tamasin Day-Lewis, and TV critic and writer Sean Day-Lewis, who wrote a biography of his father, C. Day Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980).

He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, in succession to John Masefield. Day-Lewis was also chairman of the Arts Council Literature Panel, vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Member of the Irish Academy of Letters and a professor of rhetoric at Gresham College, London.

Day-Lewis died from pancreatic cancer on May 22, 1972, in the Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, where he and his wife were staying. He was a great admirer of Thomas Hardy, and he had arranged to be buried as close as possible to the author's grave in Stinsford churchyard.[1] His epitaph reads: "Shall I be gone long? / For ever and a day / To whom there belong? / Ask the stone to say / Ask my song"

Poetry

In Oxford Day-Lewis became part of the circle gathered around W. H. Auden and helped him to edit Oxford Poetry 1927. His first collection of poems, Beechen Vigil, appeared in 1925.[1] During the Second World War his work was now no longer so influenced by Auden and he was developing a more traditional style of lyricism. Some critics believe that he reached his full stature as a poet in Word Over All (1943), when he finally distanced himself from Auden.[2]

He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, in succession to John Masefield.

Nicholas Blake

In 1935 Day-Lewis decided to supplement his income from poetry by writing a detective novel, A Question of Proof, in which he created Nigel Strangeways, an amateur investigator and gentleman detective who, as the nephew of an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, has the same access to, and good relations with, official crime investigation bodies as those enjoyed by other fictional sleuths such as Ellery Queen, Philo Vance and Lord Peter Wimsey.[3] This was followed by nineteen more crime novels. (In the first Nigel Strangeways novel, the detective is modeled on W. H. Auden, but Strangeways becomes a far less extravagant and more serious figure in later novels.) From the mid-1930s Day-Lewis was able to earn his living by writing.[1] Four of the Blake novels - A Tangled Web, Penknife In My Heart, The Deadly Joker, The Private Wound - do not feature Strangeways.

Minute for Murder is set against the background of Day-Lewis's World War II experiences in the Ministry of Information. Head of a Traveler features as a principal character a well-known poet, currently frustrated and blocked from writing, whose best poetic days are long behind him; the reader is free to speculate whether the author is describing himself, one of his colleagues, or has entirely invented the character.

Communism

In his youth Day-Lewis adopted communist views, becoming a member of the Communist party from 1935 to 1938, and his early poetry was marked by didacticism and a preoccupation with social themes.[4] After the late 1930s he gradually became disillusioned with communism.[1] Among his works is his autobiography, Buried Day (1960), in which he renounces his communist views,[5] while his detective story The Sad Variety (1964) contains a scathing portrayal of doctrinaire communists, the repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and the ruthless tactics of Soviet intelligence agents.

Selected works

Poetry collections

  • Transitional Poem (1929)
  • From Feathers To Iron (1932)
  • Collected Poems 1929–1933 (1935)
  • A Time To Dance And Other Poems (1935)
  • Overtures to Death (1938)
  • Short Is the Time (1945)
  • Collected Poems (1954)
  • Pegasus and Other Poems (1957)
  • The Whispering Roots and Other Poems (1970)[4]
  • Complete Poems (1992)[2]

Essays

  • A Hope for Poetry (1934)[4]

Translations

Novels written as Nicholas Blake

  • A Question of Proof (1935)
  • Thou Shell of Death (1936) (also published as Shell of Death)
  • There's Trouble Brewing (1937)
  • The Beast Must Die (1938)
  • The Smiler With The Knife (1939)
  • Malice in Wonderland (1940) (US title: The Summer Camp Mystery)
  • The Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941) (also published as The Corpse in the Snowman)
  • Minute for Murder (1947)
  • Head of a Traveller (1949)
  • The Dreadful Hollow (1953)
  • The Whisper in the Gloom (1954) (also published as Catch and Kill)
  • A Tangled Web (1956) (also published as Death and Daisy Bland)
  • End of Chapter (1957)
  • A Penknife in my Heart (1958)
  • The Widow's Cruise (1959)
  • The Worm of Death (1961)
  • The Deadly Joker (1963)
  • The Sad Variety (1964)
  • The Morning After Death (1966)
  • The Private Wound (1968)

Children's novels

Bibliography

  • Sean Day-Lewis, Cecil Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life" (1980)
  • Alfred Gelpi, Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis (1998)
  • Peter Stanford, "C Day-Lewis: a Life" (2007)

A New Anthology of Modern Verse 1920-1940 (1941)

Edited by Day-Lewis and L. A. G. Strong. Poets included were: Lascelles Abercrombie · Kenneth Allott · J. Redwood Anderson · W. H. Auden · George Barker · Clifford Bax · Hilaire Belloc · John Betjeman · Laurence Binyon · Edmund Blunden · Gordon Bottomley · F. V. Branford · Robert Bridges · Gerald Bullett · J. Campbell · Roy Campbell · Miles Carpenter · Christopher Caudwell · G. K. Chesterton · Wilfred Rowland Childe · Richard Church · Austin Clarke · Padraic Colum · A. E. Coppard · John Cornford · Charles Dalmon · W. H. Davies · Edward Davison · Walter De la Mare · Lord Alfred Douglas · John Drinkwater · Clifford Dyment · A. E. · T. S. Eliot · John Freeman · David Gascoyne · Wilfrid Gibson · O. St. John Gogarty · G. Rostrevor Hamilton · Thomas Hardy · Kenneth Hare · Christopher Hassall · F. R. Higgins · Ralph Hodgson · A. E. Housman · Frank Kendon · D. H. Lawrence · John Lehmann · C. Day-Lewis · F. L. Lucas · G. H. Luce · Lilian Bowes Lyon · Louis MacNeice · Charles Madge · John Masefield · Hugh MacDiarmid · Michael McKenna · Charlotte Mew · Harold Monro · Charlotte Mew · T. Sturge Moore · Edwin Muir · Frank O'Connor · Seumas O'Sullivan · Herbert Palmer · Eden Phillpotts · Ruth Pitter · William Plomer · F. T. Prince · Herbert Read · Laura Riding · Anne Ridler · Michael Roberts · V. Sackville-West · Siegfried Sassoon · Edward Shanks · Edith Sitwell · Osbert Sitwell · Stevie Smith · Stanley Snaith · Helen Spalding · Stephen Spender · J. C. Squire · James Stephens · L. A. G. Strong · Randall Swingler · A. S. J. Tessimond · Dylan Thomas · Ruthven Todd · W. J. Turner · Arthur Waley · Rex Warner · Sylvia Townsend Warner · Winifred Welles · Dorothy Wellesley · Laurence Whistler · Humbert Wolfe · William Butler Yeats · Andrew Young

The Chatto Book of Modern Poetry 1915-1955 (1956)

Edited by Day-Lewis and John Lehmann. Poets included were: Thomas Hardy · Robert Bridges · A. E. Housman · Rudyard Kipling · W. B. Yeats · Laurence Binyon · Charlotte Mew · W. H. Davies · Walter De la Mare · John Masefield · Edward Thomas · Harold Monro · John Freeman · D. H. Lawrence · Andrew Young · Frances Cornford · Siegfried Sassoon · Edwin Muir · Edith Sitwell · T. S. Eliot · Fredegond Shove · W. J. Turner · Dorothy Wellesley · Isaac Rosenberg · V. Sackville-West · Osbert Sitwell · Richard Church · Robert Nichols · Wilfred Owen · Herbert Read · Lilian Bowes Lyon · Robert Graves · Edmund Blunden · Ruth Pitter · Sacheverell Sitwell · Edgell Rickword · Roy Campbell · Michael Roberts · A. S. J. Tessimond · William Plomer · Stanley Snaith · C. Day-Lewis · Frances Bellerby · Norman Cameron · Rex Warner · Peter Quennell · John Betjeman · William Empson · Vernon Watkins · Sheila Wingfield · W. H. Auden · John Lehmann · Louis MacNeice · E. J. Scovell · Julian Bell · Jocelyn Brooke · Kathleen Raine · James Reeves · W. R. Rodgers · Bernard Spencer · Stephen Spender · Lynette Roberts · Hal Summers · Rayner Heppenstall · Paul Dehn · Roy Fuller · F. T. Prince · Anne Ridler · R. S. Thomas · George Barker · Patric Dickinson · Lawrence Durrell · Clifford Dyment · Norman Nicholson · Henry Reed · Dylan Thomas · Peter Yates · John Cornford · G. S. Fraser · Laurie Lee · Diana Witherby · David Gascoyne · Jack R. Clemo · Alun Lewis · Terence Tiller · Charles Causley · W. S. Graham · John Heath-Stubbs · James Kirkup · Keith Douglas · J. C. Hall · Hamish Henderson · David Wright · Sidney Keyes · Alan Ross · Helen Spalding

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f Cecil Day-Lewis
  2. ^ a b c BBC
  3. ^ Neglected British Crime Writers
  4. ^ a b c d Day Lewis, C
  5. ^ Arte Historia Personajes
  6. ^ An extract from this, Orpheus and Eurydice, appeared in The Queen's Book of the Red Cross.

See also

Academic offices
Preceded by
John Masefield		 British Poet Laureate
1967–1972		 Succeeded by
John Betjeman

External links

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Irish Literature Companion. The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature. Copyright © 1996, 2000, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more
Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Cecil Day-Lewis".  Read more