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The Poet Index · Entry 1355

Cecil Day-Lewis
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“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.”

Editorial intro

Storgy editorial

Editorial intro

Cecil Day-Lewis translated all three of Virgil's major works into English verse while simultaneously writing detective novels under a pseudonym to support himself — a double life that reflects the split loyalties in his work: between political commitment and private lyric, between Auden's modernist influence and his own draw toward traditional form, between the Ireland of his birth and the England that raised him.

He is usually grouped with Auden, Spender, and MacNeice as one of the "Pylon poets" of the 1930s, a label that fits his early, agitprop-inflected work but clashes with the wartime and postwar collections where his real strengths emerge. New readers are often surprised by how classical his mature voice is and by the warmth and directness of poems like "Walking Away." They are also sometimes surprised to learn that the Poet Laureate who spent his final years as a fixture of the British literary establishment was the same man who spent the mid-1930s in the Communist Party writing Shelley-quoting socialist manifestos.

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Biographical record

About Cecil Day-Lewis

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.

Reader questions

Frequently asked

Why did Day-Lewis hyphenate his name, and did he always write it that way?

The hyphen came from his father, Frank Day-Lewis, who combined the surnames of his birth father (Day) and his adoptive father (Lewis) into a single hyphenated name. Cecil inherited it, but in his autobiography *The Buried Day* he notes that as a writer he dropped the hyphen — signing himself C. Day Lewis — calling it "a piece of inverted snobbery which has produced rather mixed results." Both spellings appear in the historical record, which is why he is catalogued under both forms.

Which poetry collection is considered his most important, and why?

*Word Over All*, published in 1943, is the collection critics most often point to as the moment Day-Lewis came fully into his own. During the war years, working at the Ministry of Information and no longer under Auden's direct influence, he developed a more traditional lyricism that felt genuinely his rather than borrowed. He dedicated the book to Rosamond Lehmann, and the emotional intensity of that relationship is audible in the work.

What is the relationship between his poetry and his Auden connection?

At Oxford, Day-Lewis was part of the circle around Auden and helped him edit *Oxford Poetry 1927*. His early collections are strongly marked by Auden's rhetorical style and political preoccupations, and critics grouped the two men together as part of the 1930s left-wing poetic movement. The development of Day-Lewis's career largely tells a story of gradual separation from that influence, moving toward a more traditional and personal lyric mode, a process most critics see as complete by *Word Over All* in 1943.

Why did he write detective novels, and are they worth reading on their own terms?

Day-Lewis started writing crime fiction in 1935 under the name Nicholas Blake to earn more money than poetry provided. The Nigel Strangeways series ran to nineteen novels, and the first one modeled Strangeways directly on Auden. The books have their own literary texture: *Minute for Murder* uses his Ministry of Information experience as a backdrop, and *Head of a Traveller* centres on a once-celebrated poet suffering writer's block, a portrait that has prompted genuine critical speculation about its autobiographical dimensions.

Which poets make useful comparisons to Day-Lewis for a reader trying to place him?

The most direct comparisons are W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender — his contemporaries in the 1930s British left-wing poetic movement. For his wartime and later lyric work, comparisons to Edward Thomas and Thomas Hardy are more illuminating; Hardy was a figure Day-Lewis admired greatly and arranged to be buried near. His Virgil translations invite comparison with earlier British poet-translators in the classical tradition.

Where should a new reader start with Day-Lewis's poetry?

*Word Over All* (1943) is the best entry point for the mature work, and *The Complete Poems of C. Day-Lewis* (1992) is the most comprehensive single volume. Readers interested in his critical thinking can turn to *The Poetic Image* (1947), which grew out of his Cambridge lectures and provides a clear account of his understanding of the craft. Those curious about his life should read his autobiography *The Buried Day* (1960), in which he formally renounces the communist views of his earlier career.