Cecil Day-Lewis
history, | birthplace = Ballintubbert, Queen's County, Ireland | deathdate = (aged 68) | deathplace = Hadley Wood, Hertfordshire, England | occupation = Poet, Novelist | nationality = | period = | genre = »http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0086671/filmogenre | subject = | movement = | notableworks = | spouse = Constance Mary King (1928-1951)
Jill Balcon (1951-1972) | partner = | children = Tamasin Day-Lewis (b. 1953)
Daniel Day-Lewis (b. 1957)
Sean Day-Lewis (b. 1931)
Nicholas Day-Lewis (b. 1934) | relatives = | influences = | influenced = | signature = | website = }}
Cecil Day-Lewis (or Day Lewis) CBE (27 April 1904 – 22 May 1972) was an Irish poet and the British Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. He also wrote mystery stories under pseudonym of Nicholas Blake. He is the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis and documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.
Personal life
Day-Lewis was born in Ballintubber, Queen's County (now County Laois), Ireland. He was the son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis (December, 1872 โ 19 April 1938) and Kathleen Squires. After Day-Lewis's mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. Day-Lewis continued to regard himself as "Anglo-Irish" for the remainder of his life, though after the declaration of the Republic of Ireland in 1948 he chose British rather than Irish citizenship, on the grounds that 1940 had taught him where his deepest roots lay. He was educated at Sherborne School and at Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927.
In 1928 he married Mary King, the daughter of a Sherborne master (i.e. teacher), and worked as a schoolmaster in three schools.»Cecil Day-Lewis During the 1940s he had a long and troubled love affair with the novelist Rosamund Lehmann. His second marriage was to actress Jill Balcon. churchyard.]] During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, an institution satirised by George Orwell in his dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, but equally based on Orwell's experience of the BBC.
After the war he joined the publisher Chatto & Windus as a director and senior editor. In 1946 Day-Lewis was a lecturer at Cambridge University, publishing his lectures in The Poetic Image (1947). In 1951 he married the actress Jill Balcon, daughter of Michael Balcon. He later taught poetry at Oxford, where he was Professor of Poetry from 1951-1956. From 1962-1963 Day-Lewis was the Norton Professor at Harvard University.
Day-Lewis's two marriages yielded four children,
including Academy Award-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis, food writer and journalist Tamasin Day-Lewis, and TV critic and writer Sean Day-Lewis, who wrote a biography of his father, C. Day Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980).
Day-Lewis was chairman of the Arts Council Literature Panel, vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Member of the Irish Academy of Letters and a professor of rhetoric at Gresham College, London.
Day-Lewis died from pancreatic cancer on May 22, 1972, in the Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, where he and his wife were staying. He was a great admirer of Thomas Hardy, and he had arranged to be buried as close as possible to the author's grave in Stinsford churchyard. His epitaph reads: "Shall I be gone long? / For ever and a day / To whom there belong? / Ask the stone to say / Ask my song"
He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, in succession to John Masefield.
Minute for Murder is set against the background of Day-Lewis's World War II experiences in the Ministry of Information. Head of a Traveler features as a principal character a well-known poet, currently frustrated and blocked from writing, whose best poetic days are long behind him; the reader is free to speculate whether the author is describing himself, one of his colleagues, or has entirely invented the character.
Poetry
In Oxford Day-Lewis became part of the circle gathered around W. H. Auden and helped him to edit Oxford Poetry 1927. His first collection of poems, Beechen Vigil, appeared in 1925.
During the Second World War his work was now no longer so influenced by Auden and he was developing a more traditional style of lyricism. Some critics believe that he reached his full stature as a poet in Word Over All (1943), when he finally distanced himself from Auden.»BBC
Nicholas Blake
In 1935 Day-Lewis decided to supplement his income from poetry by writing a detective novel, A Question of Proof, in which he created Nigel Strangeways, an amateur investigator and gentleman detective who, as the nephew of an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, has the same access to, and good relations with, official crime investigation bodies as those enjoyed by other fictional sleuths such as Ellery Queen, Philo Vance and Lord Peter Wimsey.»Neglected British Crime Writers This was followed by nineteen more crime novels. (In the first Nigel Strangeways novel, the detective is modeled on W. H. Auden, but Strangeways becomes a far less extravagant and more serious figure in later novels.) From the mid-1930s Day-Lewis was able to earn his living by writing. Four of the Blake novels - A Tangled Web, Penknife In My Heart, The Deadly Joker, The Private Wound - do not feature Strangeways.
Communism
In his youth Day-Lewis adopted communist views, becoming a member of the Communist party from 1935 to 1938, and his early poetry was marked by didacticism and a preoccupation with social themes.»Day Lewis, C After the late 1930s he gradually became disillusioned with communism. Among his works is his autobiography, Buried Day (1960), in which he renounces his communist views,»Arte Historia Personajes while his detective story The Sad Variety (1964) contains a scathing portrayal of doctrinaire communists, the repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and the ruthless tactics of Soviet intelligence agents.
Selected works
Poetry collections
Novels written as Nicholas Blake
A New Anthology of Modern Verse 1920-1940 (1941)
Edited by Day-Lewis and L. A. G. Strong. Poets included were:
Lascelles Abercrombie ยท Kenneth Allott ยท J. Redwood Anderson ยท W. H. Auden ยท George Barker ยท Clifford Bax ยท Hilaire Belloc ยท John Betjeman ยท Laurence Binyon ยท Edmund Blunden ยท Gordon Bottomley ยท F. V. Branford ยท Robert Bridges ยท Gerald Bullett ยท J. Campbell ยท Roy Campbell ยท Miles Carpenter ยท Christopher Caudwell ยท G. K. Chesterton ยท Wilfred Rowland Childe ยท Richard Church ยท Austin Clarke ยท Padraic Colum ยท A. E. Coppard ยท John Cornford ยท Charles Dalmon ยท W. H. Davies ยท Edward Davison ยท Walter De la Mare ยท Lord Alfred Douglas ยท John Drinkwater ยท Clifford Dyment ยท A. E. ยท T. S. Eliot ยท John Freeman ยท David Gascoyne ยท Wilfrid Gibson ยท O. St. John Gogarty ยท G. Rostrevor Hamilton ยท Thomas Hardy ยท Kenneth Hare ยท Christopher Hassall ยท F. R. Higgins ยท Ralph Hodgson ยท A. E. Housman ยท Frank Kendon ยท D. H. Lawrence ยท John Lehmann ยท C. Day-Lewis ยท F. L. Lucas ยท G. H. Luce ยท Lilian Bowes Lyon ยท Louis MacNeice ยท Charles Madge ยท John Masefield ยท Hugh MacDiarmid ยท Michael McKenna ยท Charlotte Mew ยท Harold Monro ยท Charlotte Mew ยท T. Sturge Moore ยท Edwin Muir ยท Frank O'Connor ยท Seumas O'Sullivan ยท Herbert Palmer ยท Eden Phillpotts ยท Ruth Pitter ยท William Plomer ยท F. T. Prince ยท Herbert Read ยท Laura Riding ยท Anne Ridler ยท Michael Roberts ยท V. Sackville-West ยท Siegfried Sassoon ยท Edward Shanks ยท Edith Sitwell ยท Osbert Sitwell ยท Stevie Smith ยท Stanley Snaith ยท Helen Spalding ยท Stephen Spender ยท J. C. Squire ยท James Stephens ยท L. A. G. Strong ยท Randall Swingler ยท A. S. J. Tessimond ยท Dylan Thomas ยท Ruthven Todd ยท W. J. Turner ยท Arthur Waley ยท Rex Warner ยท Sylvia Townsend Warner ยท Winifred Welles ยท Dorothy Wellesley ยท Laurence Whistler ยท Humbert Wolfe ยท William Butler Yeats ยท Andrew Young
The Chatto Book of Modern Poetry 1915-1955 (1956)
Edited by Day-Lewis and John Lehmann. Poets included were:
Thomas Hardy ยท Robert Bridges ยท A. E. Housman ยท Rudyard Kipling ยท W. B. Yeats ยท Laurence Binyon ยท Charlotte Mew ยท W. H. Davies ยท Walter De la Mare ยท John Masefield ยท Edward Thomas ยท Harold Monro ยท John Freeman ยท D. H. Lawrence ยท Andrew Young ยท Frances Cornford ยท Siegfried Sassoon ยท Edwin Muir ยท Edith Sitwell ยท T. S. Eliot ยท Fredegond Shove ยท W. J. Turner ยท Dorothy Wellesley ยท Isaac Rosenberg ยท V. Sackville-West ยท Osbert Sitwell ยท Richard Church ยท Robert Nichols ยท Wilfred Owen ยท Herbert Read ยท Lilian Bowes Lyon ยท Robert Graves ยท Edmund Blunden ยท Ruth Pitter ยท Sacheverell Sitwell ยท Edgell Rickword ยท Roy Campbell ยท Michael Roberts ยท A. S. J. Tessimond ยท William Plomer ยท Stanley Snaith ยท C. Day-Lewis ยท Frances Bellerby ยท Norman Cameron ยท Rex Warner ยท Peter Quennell ยท John Betjeman ยท William Empson ยท Vernon Watkins ยท Sheila Wingfield ยท W. H. Auden ยท John Lehmann ยท Louis MacNeice ยท E. J. Scovell ยท Julian Bell ยท Jocelyn Brooke ยท Kathleen Raine ยท James Reeves ยท W. R. Rodgers ยท Bernard Spencer ยท Stephen Spender ยท Lynette Roberts ยท Hal Summers ยท Rayner Heppenstall ยท Paul Dehn ยท Roy Fuller ยท F. T. Prince ยท Anne Ridler ยท R. S. Thomas ยท George Barker ยท Patric Dickinson ยท Lawrence Durrell ยท Clifford Dyment ยท Norman Nicholson ยท Henry Reed ยท Dylan Thomas ยท Peter Yates ยท John Cornford ยท G. S. Fraser ยท Laurie Lee ยท Diana Witherby ยท David Gascoyne ยท Jack R. Clemo ยท Alun Lewis ยท Terence Tiller ยท Charles Causley ยท W. S. Graham ยท John Heath-Stubbs ยท James Kirkup ยท Keith Douglas ยท J. C. Hall ยท Hamish Henderson ยท David Wright ยท Sidney Keyes ยท Alan Ross ยท Helen Spalding