Cecil Day-Lewis

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Cecil Day-Lewis (or Day Lewis), born in 1904, was a poet and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 to 1972, whose writing as C. Day-Lewis changed to C. Day-Lewis.

He wrote mystery stories under Nicholas Blake's pseudonym.

Day-Lewis served as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information for the UK government and also served in the British Home Guard's Musbury branch during World War II.

Tamasin Day-Lewis, the father of actor Sir Daniel Day-Lewis, as well as documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.

Life and work

Day-Lewis was born in 1904 in Ballintubbert, Athy/Stradbally, Ireland's Queen's County (now known as County Laois), Ireland's County. He was the uncle of Frank Day-Lewis, a Church of Ireland rector of the parish, and Kathleen Blake (née Squires, 1906). Some of his relatives were from England (Hertfordshire and Canterbury). His father used the surname "Day-Lewis" to describe a blend of his own birth father's ("Day") and adoptive father's ("Lewis") surnames. "I do not use the hyphen in my surname as a writer," Day-Lewis wrote in his autobiography "As a writer, I do not use the hyphen in my surname."

Cecil was brought up in London by his father, with the support of an aunt, during summer holidays with relatives in County Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford. Day-Lewis, who was born in Oxford, was a member of the Oxford group gathered around W. H. Auden and helped him edit Oxford Poetry 1927. Beechen Vigil, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1925.

Day-Lewis married Constance Mary King, the daughter of a Sherborne tutor, in 1928. Day-Lewis worked as a schoolmaster in three schools, including Larchfield School in Helensburgh, Scotland (now Lomond School). He had a long and tense affair with novelist Rosamond Lehmann during the 1940s. His first marriage was annulled in 1951, and he married actress Jill Balcon, Michael Balcon's daughter.

He served as an assistant in the Ministry of Information during the Second World War, a Ministry of Information that George Orwell's dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four's satirical work in the second World War, but also based on Orwell's experience with the BBC. His work during the Second World War was less influenced by Auden and he was creating a more recognizable style of lyricism. According to some commentators, he surpassed himself as a poet in Word Over All (1943), when he finally distanced himself from Auden. Chatto & Windus as a writer and senior editor after the war.

Day-Lewis, a Cambridge University lecturer, published his lectures in The Poetic Image (1947). In the 1950 Birthday Honours, Day-Lewis became a Commander of the Most Valuable Order of the British Empire. He taught poetry at Oxford University, where he served as Professor of Poetry from 1951 to 1956. He served at Harvard University from 1962-193. In 1968, Day Lewis was appointed Poet Laureate, succeeding John Masefield.

Day-Lewis, chairman of the Arts Council Literature Committee, Vice President of the Royal Society of Letters, an Honorary Member of the Irish Academy of Letters, and a Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London, was chairman of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of the American Academy of Letters.

Cecil Day-Lewis died of pancreatic cancer at Lemmons, the Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, where he and his family were staying. He planned to be buried near the author's grave at St Michael's Church in Stinsford, Dorset, as a great fan of Thomas Hardy.

Day-Lewis was the father of four children. Sean Day-Lewis, a TV critic and writer, and Nicholas Day-Lewis, who became an engineer, were his first two children, together with Constance Mary King (3 August 1931–9 June 2022). Tamasin Day-Lewis, a television chef and food critic, and Daniel Day-Lewis, an award-winning actor, were among his children's with Balcon. Sean Day-Lewis wrote a biography about his father, C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980).

Daniel Day-Lewis donated his father's poetry collection to the Bodleian Library.

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