C. Day-Lewis
born April 27, 1904, Ballintubbert,
County Leix, Ire.
died May 22, 1972, Hadley Wood,
Hertfordshire, Eng.
one of the leading British poets of the
1930s; he then turned from poetry of
left-wing political statement to an
individual lyricism expressed in more
traditional forms.
The son of a clergyman, Day-Lewis was
educated at the University of Oxford and
taught school until 1935. His Transitional
Poem (1929) had already attracted attention,
and in the 1930s he was closely associated
with W.H. Auden (whose style influenced his
own) and other poets who sought a left-wing
political solution to the ills of the day.
Typical of his views at that time is the
verse sequence The Magnetic Mountain (1933)
and the critical study A Hope for Poetry
(1934).
Day-Lewis was Clark lecturer at the
University of Cambridge in 1946; his
lectures there were published as The Poetic
Image (1947). In 1952 he published his verse
translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, which was
commissioned by the BBC. He also translated
Virgil’s Georgics (1940) and Eclogues
(1963). He was professor of poetry at Oxford
from 1951 to 1956. The Buried Day (1960),
his autobiography, discusses his acceptance
and later rejection of communism. Collected
Poems appeared in 1954. Later volumes of
verse include The Room and Other Poems
(1965) and The Whispering Roots (1970). The
Complete Poems of C. Day-Lewis was published
in 1992.
At his death he was poet laureate, having
succeeded John Masefield in 1968. Under the
pseudonym of Nicholas Blake he also wrote
detective novels, including Minute for
Murder (1948) and Whisper in the Gloom
(1954).
