Selected Poems

by C. Day Lewis

Overview

In this welcome centenary edition of C. Day Lewis's poems, Jill Balcon has substantially extended her husband's own Penguin selections of 1951 and 1969, including not only his last collection The Whispering Roots (1970), but also vers d'occasion written when he was Poet Laureate and a number of the Posthumous Poems. This broad retrospective allows the reader a proper view of the technical variety and range of Day Lewis's work, from the pastoral lyrics of his youth, inspired by Hardy and Yeats, through the political verse of the 1930s, to the reflective and more personal poems of his later years. Day Lewis was fond of quoting Robert Frost's dictum that 'a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom'. This could equally well describe his own development as a writer: idealistic, sincere and psychologically acute, he bears witness in his poetry to a lifelong commitment to serving literature and its makers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781904634119
Publisher:	Enitharmon Press
Publication date:	10/01/2004
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

C. Day Lewis, born in Ireland in 1904, was Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in May 1972. He published many volumes of poetry, as well as essays, critical studies, translations of Virgil and Valéry, and twenty crime novels written under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake. A popular broadcaster, lecturer and reader of poetry, he was Clark Lecturer at Cambridge (1946), Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1951-56), Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard (1964-65), and Compton Lecturer at Hull University (1968). He was awarded a CBE and was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.