Cecil Day-Lewis
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Cecil Day-Lewis (or Day Lewis) CBE (27 April 1904 – 22 May 1972) was an Anglo-Irish poet born in Ballintubber, County Laois, Ireland, the son of the Rev. Frank Cecil Day Lewis and Kathleen Squires. He was educated at Sherborne School and at Wadham College, Oxford, where he made the acquaintance of W. H. Auden.
Life
After Day-Lewis' mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt. Day-Lewis graduated from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1927. In Oxford he became part of the circle gathered around W.H. Auden and helped him to edit Oxford Poetry 1927. His first collection of poems, Beechen Virgil, appeared in 1925. [Cecil Day-Lewis]
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.[Day Lewis, C] He served as a partisan in the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War, but after the late 1930s he gradually became disillusioned,[Cecil Day-Lewis]. Among his works is his autobiography, Buried Day (1960), in which he renounces his communist views.[Arte Historia Personajes]
In 1928 he married Mary King, the daughter of a Sherborne master, and worked as a schoolmaster in three schools.[Cecil Day-Lewis]
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, 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.[Neglected British Crime Writers] This was followed by nineteen more crime novels. From the mid-1930s Day-Lewis was able to earn his living by writing.[Cecil Day-Lewis]
During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information. 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 was finally distanced from Auden.[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. He later taught poetry at Oxford, where he was Professor of Poetry from 1951-1956.[Cecil Day-Lewis]
Day-Lewis's two marriages yielded five children, one of whom is Academy Award-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis. Among his other children are TV critic and writer Sean Day-Lewis, who wrote a biography of his father, C. Day Lewis: An English Literary Life, published in 1980, and journalist Tamasin Day-Lewis.
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 American Academy, a Member of Irish Academy of Letters and a professor of rhetoric at Gresham College, London.
Day-Lewis died on May 22, 1972, in the Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elisabeth 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.[Cecil Day-Lewis]
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Poetry
\"Untitled\"
- Come, live with me and be my love,
- And we will all the pleasures prove
- Of peace and plenty, bed and board,
- That chance employment may afford.
- I'll handle dainties on the docks
- And thou shalt read of summer frocks:
- At evening by the sour canals
- We'll hope to hear some madrigals.
- Care on thy maiden brow shall put
- A wreath of wrinkles, and thy foot
- Be shod with pain: not silken dress
- But toil shall tire thy loveliness.
- Hunger shall make thy modest zone
- And cheat fond death of all but bone-
- If these delights thy mind may move,
- Then live with me and be my love.[Untitled]
Works
Poetry collections
- 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)[Poetry]
- Complete Poems (1992)[Complete Poems]
Essays
Translations
- Virgil's Georgics (1940)
- Virgil's Aeneid (1952)
- Eclogues (1963)[Translation][BBC]
Novels Written as Nicholas Blake
- A Question Of Proof (1935)
- Thou Shell Of Death (1936)
- There's Trouble Brewing (1937)
- The Smiler With The Knife (1938)
- The Beast Must Die (1938)
- Malice In Wonderland (1940)
- The Case Of The Abominable Snowman (1941)
- Minute For Murder (1946)
- Head Of A Traveller (1949)
- The Whisper In The Gloom (1954)
- A Tangled Web (1956)
- End Of Chapter (1957)
- The Widow's Cruise (1959)
- The Sad Variety (1964)
- The Morning After Death (1966)
- The Private Wound (1968)[Neglected British Crime Writers]
Bibliography
- Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis, Albert Gelpi, the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature
Notes
See also
- List of Gresham Professors of Rhetoric
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External links
- [Day-Lewis' Grave]
- [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)
- [Recordings of interviews] at BBC Four website (Realplayer required)
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