Literary Birthday – 27 April – Cecil Day-Lewis

Cecil Day-Lewis was born on 27 April 1904 and died on 22 May 1972.

Cecil Day-Lewis Quotes

1. First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand. (Goodreads)
2. A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born … in poetry. (Goodreads)
3. Selfhood begins with a walking away, And love is proved in letting go. (The Complete Poems)
4. A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen. (A-Z)
5. It is unwise to equate scientific activity with what we call reason, poetic activity with what we call imagination. Without the imaginative leap from facts to generalisation, no theoretic discovery in science is made. The poet, on the other hand, must not imagine but reason–that is to say, he must exercise a great deal of consciously directed thought in the selection and rejection of his data: there is a technical logic, a poetic reasoning in his choice of the words, rhythms and images by which a poem’s coherence is achieved. (A-Z)
6. No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster? (BrainyQuote)

Cecil Day-Lewis was an Anglo-Irish poet. He was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 until his death. John Masefield was his predecessor. The Poetry Foundation says: ‘…his native poetic temperament was always romantic, even Georgian, and that the ideological overtones of his work in the 1930s were even then at war with a talent more at home with nature poetry and personal lyrics.’ Hogarth Press brought out Collected Poems 1929-1933 (1935), which was also published with A Hope for Poetry by Random House in New York. All of his poetry can be found in The Complete Poems. He also wrote detective novels under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, most of which feature the fictional detective Nigel Strangeways, including Minute for Murder (1948) and Whisper in the Gloom (1954). He was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in the 1950 Birthday Honours. In his autobiography The Buried Day, Day-Lewis wrote: ‘As a writer I do not use the hyphen in my surname – a piece of inverted snobbery which has produced rather mixed results.’ He was the father of the actor Sir Daniel Day-Lewis.

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by Amanda Patterson

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