Cecil Day Lewis

Cecil Day-Lewis CBE (*27 April in 1904, died 22 May, 1972) was an Anglo-Irish writer and poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, succeeding John Masefield. He is also known under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake with which he published several mystery and detective novels.

Childhood & Education

He was born in Ballintubber, Queen's County (now County Laois), Ireland, but the Day-Lewis family moved to England in 1906. His mother died of cancer in 1908. He attended prep school in London but then attended a boarding school in Dorset. In October 1923 he went up to Wadham College, Oxford.

Life & Work

As he dedicated himself to poetry and he soon published his first volume of poetry “Beechen Vigil” in 1925. In 1927, his final year of college, he met fellow student W.H. Auden and helped him to edit Oxford Poetry 1927.

Cecil Day-Lewis made his reputation in the 1930s as one of the “Oxford Poets” and “Poets of the Thirties” - alongside with Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and others, also known as “MacSpaunday” and “Auden Group”. He also joined the Communist party in the 1930s, but quit the party in 1939 since he was disenchanted with revolutionary and radical left-wing ideas. During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information. His own work was now no longer influenced by his friend W.H. Auden and distanced himself from Auden with the publications of “Word Over All” in 1943[1], judged my many as his greatest work. In 1946 he worked as a lecturer at Camebridge University and was later a professor of Poetry in Oxford himself in 1951-1956.

Cecil Day-Lewis was married twice. In 1928 he married Mary with whom he had two children but divorced her in 1950. After his divorce from Mary he married actress Jill Bacon. They had two children, one of them being the Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis. He died of cancer on May 22, 1972 with his family and friends around him.

Style

Works

Sources

http://wwp.greenwichpast.com/vip/writers/day-lewis.htm

http://www.cday-lewis.co.uk/#/biography/

Southworth, James G. Sowing the Sping: Studies in British Poets from Hopkins to MacNeice. Hallendale: New World Book, 1968.