In this welcome centenary edition of C. Day Lewis' 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' 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.

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 Valery, 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.Jill Balcon has had a distinguished broadcasting career for over sixty years and is well known for her public readings of poetry in the UK, Europe and America. She is the editor of the Posthumous Poems and The Complete Poems of C. Day Lewis.


Book Information
ISBN 9781904634119
Author C. Day Lewis
Format Hardback
Page Count 232
Imprint Enitharmon Press
Publisher Enitharmon Press