Life
1905-1972 [C. Day Lewis; bapt. Day-Lewis; pseud. Nicholas Blake]; b. 24
April, Ballintubbert House, Ballintober, Co. Laois, son of Frank Day-Lewis,
an Anglican minster who came to Ballintubbert House as rector in 1902,
bringing his newly-wed wife Kathleen; registered
as Cecil Day by way of Christian name; spent 18 months in Ballintubbert
and left for Worcestershire in pursuit of clerical career; death of Kathleen,
1908; ed. Sherbourne and Wadham College (Oxon.); m. Mary King, 1928, mother
of Sean and David; taught at Cheltenham Junior School, 1930-35; wrote
proto-agrarian poetry in the 1930s; moved to Devon, 1936; joined British
Communist Party, 1937; ed. The Mind in Chains (1937), left-wing
symposium; brought to Jonathan Cape, publisher, by Rupert Hard-Davis;
by his horatory ode ‘On the Twentieth Anniversary of Soviet Power’,
hailing Lenin as ‘loved by the people’; with Auden, Spender,
and MacNeice, called ‘MacSpaunday’ by satirist Roy Campbell;
Ministry of Information, 1939-45; collaborated with L. A. G. Strong on
a New Anthology of Modern Verse (1940), for Methuen; winner of
Roger Casement Prize of Irish Academy of Arts and Letters (IAL), 1940
- the last presentation of the award; issued wartime translation of Virgil’s
Georgics; Clark lectures, Cambridge 1946, resulted in The Poetic
Image (1946); reader for Chatto & Windus; Oxford Prof. of Poetry,
1951-1956; Vice-Pres. Royal Society of Literature, and Arts Council member;
decade-long relationship with Rosamund Lehmann; m. actor Jill Balcon,
1951, with whom a son, the actor Daniel Day-Lewis ((b. 29 April 1957);
succeeded John Masefield as Poet Laureate, 1968; issued Poems 1943-1947
(1948), showing influence of Hardy and Edward Thomas; wrote successful
detective novels as ‘Nicholas Blake’, trans. Aeneid,
and publ. poetry incl. Italian Visit (1953); Collected Poems
(1954); Requiem for the Living (1964); The Room and other Poems
(1965), autobiography, Buried Day (1960); gave Charles Eliot Norton
lectures at Harvard, 1964 (The Poetic Impulse, 1965); his detective
fiction as Nicholas Blake includes The Private Wound (1958), set
in West of Ireland; d. Herts; his eldest son Sean Day-Lewis wrote a biography
(1980); the Complete Poems were edited by Balcon in 1992; his birthplace
was subsequently owned by the actor John Hurt and resold in 1996; a plaque
commemorates the planting of lime trees by local writers on the poet’s
birthday in 1985. DIL DIW OCEL HAM OCIL
[ top ]
Works
Poetry, Beechen Vigil (1925), pamph.; Country Comets
(1928), pamph.; Transitional Poems (1929); From Feathers to
Iron (1931); The Magnetic Mountain (1933); A Time to Dance
(1935), and Noah and the Waters (1936); Overtures to Death
(London: Jonathan Cape 1938; rep. 1946); Word Over All (1943);
Poems 1943-47 (1948); An Italian Visit (1953) [lyrical narrative
poem]; Pegasus (1957); The Gate (1962); The Room
(1965); The Whispering Roots (1970). COLLECTED EDNS: Collected
Poems, 1954 (London: Jonathan Cape & Hogarth 1954); Selected
Poems (NY: Harper & Row 1967); Jill Balcon, ed., C Day Lewis,
The Complete Poems (London: Sinclair-Stevenson 1992), 745pp. [pbk].
Translations, Georgics (1940); The Aeneid of Virgil (Hogarth Press 1952), 288pp. [155 signed copies]; Eclogues (1963); Le Cimetiere Marin (1946), after Valéry.
Fiction, The Friendly Tree (1936), Starting Point (1937), and Child of Misfortune (1939). Whisper in the Gloom (1954); The Private Wound (London: Collins 1958), &c.
Detective novels, as Nicholas Blake, A Question of Proof (1935; rep. 1990); The Beast Must Die (1938; rep. 1989); The Smiler with the Knife (1938; rep. 1985); The Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941; rep. 1980); Minute for Murder (Collins 1947); Head of a Traveller (1948; rep. 1986); A Tangled Web (1956; rep. 1991); End of Chapter (Collins 1957); The Private Wound (Collins 1958) [with reprints by Atlantic Large Print Books; Hogarth; Ulverscroft Large Print Books; Dent.]
Criticism, A Hope for Poetry (1934); The Poetic Image (1947); The Buried Day (1960), autobiography; The Poetic Impulse (1965). Miscellaneous, with L. A. G. Strong, ed., New Anthology of Modern Verse (London: Methuen 1940). Also, ‘Dreams and Destinations: C. Day Lewis Reads his Poems ’ [BBC3 1972]; re-broadcast in Peter Porter, ed. Selected Poems (Sun. 31 Feb. 1992).
[ top ]
Criticism
Geoffrey Handley-Taylor and Timothy d’Arch Smith, C. Day-Lewis, The
Poet Laureate: A Bibliography (Chicago/London: St James 1968).
Joseph N. C. Riddell, C. Day Lewis (NY: Twayne 1971).
Ian Parson, Poems of C Day Lewis 1925-1972 (1977).
Sean Day-Lewis, C. Day Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980).
Albert Gelpi, Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis (OUP 1998), 240pp.
See also Michael O’Neill and Gareth Reeeves, Auden, MacNeice, Spender (1992).
Julian Symons, The Art of Murder, Stories of Crime and Detection. A Select Bibliography (London: British Council 1992).
Michael Walters, review of Jill Balcon, ed., The Complete Poems
of C. Day Lewis (London: Sinclair-Stevenson 1992).
Michael O’Neill & Gareth Reeves, Auden, MacNeice, Spender, The Thirties Poetry (London: Macmillan [1992]), 254pp., in Times Literary Supplement ( 28 Aug. 1992), p.10.
[ top ]
In 1940, C. Day Lewis collaborated with L. A. G. Strong on a New Anthology of Modern Verse (Methuen 1940). The anthology includes a conversation between the editors about poetry, in a dialogue which forms the preface. It omits Robert Graves from the number of its poets. Collections by Lewis cited are, From Feathers to Iron (1931); The Magnetic Mountain (1933); A Hope for Poetry (1934); An Italian Visit (1953). The reviewer speaks of Lewis’s accommodation to ‘a more socially adjusted afflatus’, ‘the Complete Poems helps to clarify [...] how the apparatus of the 1920s poet - late Georgian modulations of Keats, fitfully infused with a Yeatsian vigour - came to be adapted to the exigencies of the frontier-conscious new decade’, choosing an as an instance lines which occasion the remark, ‘Doing Florence in different voices, Day Lewis finds the calculated bathhos inherent in high Yeatsian rhetoric apprpriate to Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes, ‘And presently/matching deceit with bitterer deceit,/She had struck off that tipsy captain’s head/Upon the still untousled bed,/and borne it homeward in a bag of meat.’ Walters comments of such ventriloquy, ‘like all the best pastice, they read as incisive criticism’.
Margaret Drabble, ed., Oxford Companion of English Literature (OUP 1985); bio-dates, 1904-72; son of Church of Ireland minister; moved
England 1905; ed. Oxford Poetry with Auden, 1927; adopted
pseud. ‘Nicolas Blake’ in the 1930s; autobiog. The Buried
Day (1960), a searching account of his father’s ‘divided
heart’ and search for identity much amplified by Sean Day-Lewis (1980).
Robert Hogan, Dictionary of Irish Literature (Greenwood/Gill & Macmillan 1979), under Day-Lewis, remarks: never forgot his Irish connection ... related to Goldsmith ... English poet; cites nstances poems “The House Where I was Born”; “Fishguard to Rosslare”; “My Mohter’s Sisters”; and “Remembering Con Markievicz”; also detective novel, The Private Wound (1958), set in West of Ireland.
The Battle of Aughrim by Richard Murphy was broadcast by BBC in 1968, with Ted Hughes and Cecil Day Lewis among the readers.
“In the House Where I Was Born”, written 50 years after, Day-Lewis wrote: ‘No one is left alive to tell me / In which of these rooms I was born. / Or what my mother could see, looking out one April / Morning, her agony done, / Or if there were pigeons to answer my cooings / From the tree to the left of the lawn.’ . (See John MacKenna, “Literary Landmarks”, in The Irish Times, 8 Sept. 2001, Weekend, p.10.)
Kith & Kin: F. Lewis Day [or Day Lewis] is the author of Pattern Design: A Book for Students Teaating in a practical Way of the Anatomy, Planning and Evolution of Repeated Ornament (London: B. T. Batsford 1903), xx, 267pp. with 285 ills. (See Peter Ellis, Cat. 2004.)
Patrick Ramsay, review of Patrick Crotty, Contemporary Irish Poetry (1995), in Fortnight (Jan. 1996): ‘Cecil Day Lewis, that most awkward reminder for an uncertain Free State aesthetic of the interrelatedness of the Irish and the English Muse’ (p.33).
[ top ]
Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)