Cecil Day Lewis was professor of poetry at the University of Oxford, a position he held from 1951 to 1956. He authored several studies of poetry as well as two books of poems including Country Comets (1928) and Overtures to Death (1938). He also wrote detective stories under the pen name Nicholas Blake. During the Second World War, he held the position of publications editor with the Ministry of Information and served in the British Home Guard. In 1950, he was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. He had previously been schoolmaster at Summerfield, Larchfield, and Cheltenham College. At the time of his lectures, he worked with the publishers’ Chatto and Windus. Day Lewis was chairman of the Arts Council Literature Panel, vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Member of the Irish Academy of Letters and a Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London. Day Lewis was poet laureate of England from 1968 to his death in 1972.
Day Lewis gave three lectures: Emily Bronte and Freedom, George Meredith and Responsibility & W.B. Yeats and Human Dignity. Day-Lewis told his audience that while poets feel passionately about freedom, responsibility, and human dignity, they needed to control those feelings in order to create art that brings thoughts to life. A poem, in his view, did not make a statement about freedom so much as paint an image of freedom. Through his lectures, Day Lewis analyzed Emily Bronte, George Meredith, and W.B. Yeats’ poems. In Bronte’s work he saw a peculiar freedom that arose from her status as a women; in Meredith’s, the problem of the responsibility of upholding a loveless marriage; in Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” Day Lewis traced the movement toward a New Dark Age emerging from “progress,” as traditional ways of life were swept away. Day Lewis claimed that this final work highlighted the separation between human dignity, found in a settled, traditional and simple life, and a “flood of vulgarity” pushed forth by “progress.”
Listen to an excerpt of his lectures or read the full transcript below.
Download the C. Day Lewis transcript (PDF)
While at Queen’s, Day Lewis also gave several less formal addresses and a poetry reading, which aroused great student interest. The Queen’s Journal reprinted some major excerpts of his first talk and one of his poems, entitled “Father to Sons.”
