Poetry:
Beechen Vigil, and Other Poems, 1925
Country Comets, 1928
Transitional Poem, 1929
From Feathers to Iron, 1931
The Magnetic Mountain, 1933
Collected Poems, 1929-1933, 1935
A Time to Dance, and Other Poems, 1935
Overtures to Death, and Other Poems, 1938
Poems in Wartime, 1940
Selected Poems, 1940
Word over All, 1943
Short Is the Time: Poems, 1936-1943, 1945
Poems, 1943-1947, 1948
Collected Poems, 1929-1936, 1948
Selected Poems, 1951
An Italian Visit, 1953
Collected Poems, 1954
The Newborn: D.M.B., 29th April 1957, 1957
Pegasus, and Other Poems, 1957
The Gate, and Other Poems, 1962
Requiem for the Living, 1964
A Marriage Song for Albert and Barbara, 1965
The Room, and Other Poems, 1965
Selections from His Poetry, 1967 (Patric Dickinson, editor)
Selected Poems, 1967
The Abbey That Refused to Die: A Poem, 1967
The Whispering Roots, 1970
The Poems, 1925-1972, 1977 (Ian Parsons, editor)
The Complete Poems of C. Day Lewis, 1992
Long Fiction:
A Question of Proof, 1935
The Friendly Tree, 1936
Starting Point, 1937
Child of Misfortune, 1939
Malice in Wonderland, 1940
The Case of the Abominable Snowman, 1941
Minute for Murder, 1947
A Tangled Web, 1956
The Deadly Joker, 1963
The Private Wound, 1968
Drama:
Noah and the Waters, pb. 1936
Nonfiction:
A Hope for Poetry, 1934
Revolution in Writing, 1935
The Poetic Image, 1947
The Colloquial Element in English Poetry, 1947
The Poet’s Task, 1951
The Poet’s Way of Knowledge, 1957
The Buried Day, 1960
The Lyric Impulse, 1965
A Need for Poetry?, 1968
Translations:
The Georgics of Virgil, 1940
The Graveyard by the Sea, 1946 (Paul Valéry)
The Aeneid of Virgil, 1952
The Eclogues of Virgil,1963
Children’s/Young Adult Literature:
The Otterbury Incident, 1948
Cecil Day Lewis (originally Day-Lewis) was a leading figure among the young British poets who in the 1930’s were concerned chiefly with themes of social protest, and his reputation both in that unsettled decade and after was solid and secure. He was born on April 27, 1904, in Ballintubbert, Ireland; his father was an English clergyman, his mother a descendant of Oliver Goldsmith. She died while he was still young, leaving him with an emotionally demanding father. During his childhood the family returned to England. Day Lewis began to write verses when he was six, and at the Sherbourne School he was several times awarded its poetry prize. At Wadham College, Oxford, he first became affiliated with the literary group which included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and others. With Auden he edited the 1927 volume of Oxford Poetry. In 1928 he married Constance King, with whom he had two sons, Sean and Nicholas. He and his wife were divorced in 1951.
Leftist in politics, the group with which Day Lewis was associated engaged in violent and often obscure protest against conditions of the 1930’s, primarily in the areas of social class and politics. Their poetry, however, was often characterized by esoteric imagery and private allusion, so that many readers found themselves bewildered by verse that ranged in style from the gravely satirical to the frivolously diffuse. Among some readers and critics this poetry came to be known as “coterie verse”; nevertheless it was a significant reflection of the uncertainty of the decade.
More concerned with the individual in his later works, and less with ideological causes, Day Lewis softened his attacks on what he once thought of as the weakening culture of the modern world and on religion. This change is apparent in the verse written during the years he was teaching at various colleges before he turned to poetry as his essential occupation in 1935. World War II deepened in him a sense of responsibility; his verse about the dangers of fascism is sharp and severe, and in the poems of his middle period he showed awareness of the social weaknesses that open the way for aggression.
Day Lewis was also distinguished as a writer of prose. He wrote several books on the nature and function of poetry that gave him considerable stature as a critic. His novel Starting Point was followed by a series of entertaining mystery stories published under the pen name of Nicholas Blake. Poetry remained his first interest, though. Never an exclusive poet, he did much to bring poetry to a wider audience. He lectured successfully on the subject and, with his second wife, Jill Balcon, whom he married in 1951, gave extremely popular readings from his own work. In later years he became interested in poetry for children and tried in a number of ways to help them develop an appreciation of verse. Day Lewis was made professor of poetry at Oxford in 1951. In 1968 he was appointed poet laureate as a successor to John Masefield. His son by his second marriage, Daniel, became a well-known and respected film actor.