Cecil Day-Lewis

Cecil Day-Lewis (born in Ballintubbert, Ireland, 1904; died in Hertfordshire, England, 1972) was an Anglo-Irish poet who held the post of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 until his death. He also wrote detective novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake. His career matters because it traces a path from the politically committed verse of the 1930s to a more personal, traditional lyricism, and because he linked the generation of W. H. Auden with postwar poetry.

He was raised in London by his father, a clergyman, after his mother died when he was two. At Oxford he joined the circle around Auden. His early work, shaped by the Great Depression, was didactic and socially engaged, and he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain from 1935 to 1938. After the Second World War, having distanced himself from both Auden and communism, he turned towards private life and a more lyrical style. He worked as a publications editor in wartime government service and as a director at the publisher Chatto & Windus, and he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1951 to 1956.

In 1935 he began writing detective fiction partly to increase his income. His amateur detective Nigel Strangeways carried those books, which gave him a readership different from that of his verse.

His legacy rests mainly on his translations of Virgil, his anthologies and the influence of his poetry on later readers and critics. He was the father of the actor Daniel Day-Lewis and the chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.