C. Day Lewis (Cecil Day-Lewis, 1904-72) was a poet of Anglo-Irish origin who was in the 1930s central to the idealistic Leftism of the “Auden group” of young English writers, but who subsequently evolved into a more quietly private kind of poet, a distinguished translator of Virgil and eventually Poet Laureate (1968-72). He also wrote novels and works of literary criticism under his own name – from which he preferred to drop the hyphen – and light crime fiction under a pseudonym (for this, see our separate article on “Nicholas Blake”). Like Stephen Spender, his poetic reputation came to be eclipsed by those of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, and he is now usually remembered, on the basis of immature work, as an inferior “Thirties” poet, a classification that hastily…
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Citation: Baldick, Chris. "Cecil Day-Lewis". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 April 2020 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1175, accessed 21 November 2024.]
