Cecil Day-Lewis was born on 27 April 1904 in Ballintubbert, on the Athy/Stradbally border in what was then Queen's County (now County Laois), Ireland. His father, Frank Day-Lewis, was a Church of Ireland rector who constructed his hyphenated surname from the names of his birth father and his adoptive father. Day-Lewis's mother died in 1906 when he was two, and his father raised him in London with help from an aunt, while summer holidays were spent with relatives in County Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and then at Wadham College, Oxford, where he fell into the orbit of W. H. Auden and helped edit *Oxford Poetry 1927*. His first collection, *Beechen Vigil and other Poems*, appeared in 1925, while he was still a student.
The political turbulence of the 1930s drew Day-Lewis into the Communist Party of Great Britain, which he joined in 1935 and left in 1938. His early collections — *Transitional Poem* (1929), *From Feathers to Iron* (1931), and *A Time to Dance and Other Poems* (1935) — reflected Auden's influence and a didactic, socially committed stance. He edited the socialist anthology *The Mind in Chains* in 1937, framing its Promethean title with references to Shelley. By the early 1940s, working as a publications editor in the wartime Ministry of Information, he moved away from Auden toward a more traditional lyricism. Critics who track his development often point to *Word Over All* (1943) — dedicated to the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, with whom he was conducting a long and troubled love affair — as the collection in which he came into his own voice.
“After the war, Day-Lewis joined the publisher Chatto & Windus as a director and senior editor.”
He delivered lectures at Cambridge in 1946 that became *The Poetic Image* (1947) and held the Oxford Professorship of Poetry from 1951 to 1956. Between 1962 and 1963 he was Norton Professor at Harvard. His translations of Virgil — the *Georgics* (1940), the *Aeneid* (1952), and the *Eclogues* (1963) — represent a substantial parallel body of work, undertaken with scholarly seriousness and a feel for sustained verse narrative. He was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1968, succeeding John Masefield, though the consultation that preceded his appointment was not a ringing endorsement: one adviser called him "a safe bet."
Running alongside the poetry for most of his career was a second identity: under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, Day-Lewis wrote detective fiction beginning with *A Question of Proof* in 1935, a decision made to supplement his income from verse. The Blake novels feature the gentleman detective Nigel Strangeways — modeled initially on Auden himself — and eventually numbered nineteen Strangeways titles plus four non-series novels. *Minute for Murder* (1947) drew on his Ministry of Information years; *Head of a Traveller* (1949) features a blocked, faded poet as a central character, prompting readers to wonder how autobiographical the portrait was. His personal life was equally turbulent: after years of conducting simultaneous relationships with his first wife Constance Mary King, with Lehmann, and with the actress Jill Balcon, he divorced in 1951 and married Balcon. Their children were the television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis and the actor Sir Daniel Day-Lewis, who later donated his father's poetry archive to the Bodleian Library. Cecil Day-Lewis died of pancreatic cancer on 22 May 1972 at the Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard. A devoted admirer of Thomas Hardy, he arranged to be buried near Hardy's grave at St Michael's Church in Stinsford, Dorset.