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Biography of Cecil Day LewisName: Cecil Day LewisBirth Date: April 27, 1904 Death Date: May 22, 1972 Place of Birth: Ballintogher, Ireland Nationality: English Gender: Male Occupations: poet, essayist Cecil Day Lewis The British poet, essayist, and detective story writer Cecil Day Lewis (1904-1972) regarded himself as a voice of revolution, both poetic and political, taking as a necessary starting point the "certainty of new life."Born on April 27, 1904, in Ballintogher, Ireland, C. Day Lewis was the only child of the Rev. F. C. Day Lewis. When Cecil was 4, his mother died and the family moved to England. He was educated at Sherborne School on a scholarship and was an exhibitioner at Wadham College, Oxford. Of necessity he taught at various schools until 1935, when he began to give full time to writing, editing, and political activity. During the 1930s he was a friend of W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, sharing their leftist political views.Lewis had written poetry seriously since he was 6 and in 1927 had been coeditor of Oxford Poetry. But his financial independence was achieved through his detective stories, which have …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. His publications are too numerous to list or to discuss here. The reader may want to explore first what has appeared in standard anthologies and in Lewis's own collections: Collected Poems, 1935; Short Is the Time (poetry from 1936 to 1943), 1945; Poems, 1943-47, 1948; Collected Poems, 1954; The Gate, and Other Poems, 1962; Requiem for the Living, 1964; and The Room, and Other Poems, 1965. For his critical views, one may look at Revolution in Writing, 1935; The Poet's Task, 1951; The Poet's Way of Knowledge, 1957; and The Lyric Impulse, 1965. Louis Untermeyer has said that the essays in Lewis's A Hope for Poetry (1934) are "by far the best analysis of recent poetry that has yet appeared."In 1968 Lewis was appointed poet laureate. He died in London on May 22, 1972. Further Reading Lewis's autobiography is The Buried Day (1960). A book-length study is Clifford Dyment, C. Day Lewis (1944; 2d ed. 1963). See also Derek Stanford, Pylon Poets: MacNeice, Spender, Day-Lewis (1969). |