Together with Auden, Spender and MacNeice, C. Day Lewis was one of the leading young poets who in the 1930s broke away from the poetic establishment of those days. Day Lewis started writing poetry very young and, despite an active career which embraced schoolmastering , journalism, publishing, academic lecturing and the writing of detective stories, his devotion to poetry never wavered. Always prolife, he continued to write to the end of his days, so that when he died in 1972, having held the Chair of Poetry at Oxford from 1951 and 1956 and having been appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, he left behind a very large and varied body of work. Here, for the first time, are all the poems Day Lewis wrote, including the vers d'occasion which have never previously appeared in book form and a number of works which have only been published in a limited edition before now.

C. Day Lewis (1904-1972) was one of the leading young poets of the 1930's who - along with W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender - broke away from the staid poetic establishment to dominate British poetry in the middle third of the century. Here, for the first time, are all the poems Day Lewis wrote, including occasional verse which has never appeared in book form and a number of poems previously published only in limited editions. The Complete Poems has been edited, with an introduction and textual notes, by Jill Balcon, the poet's widow.

The Oxford poets of the 1930s--W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, and Louis MacNeice--represented the first concerted British challenge to the domination of twentieth-century poetry by the innovations of American modernists such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Known for their radical politics and aesthetic conservatism, the "Auden Generation" has come to loom large in our map of twentieth century literary history. Yet Auden's voluble domination of the group in its brief period of association, and Auden's sway with critics ever since, has made it difficult to hear the others on their own terms and in their own distinct voices. Here, rendered in eloquent prose by one of our most distinguished critics of modern poetry, is the first full-length study of the poetry of C. Day Lewis, a book that introduces the reader to a profoundly revealing and beautifully wrought record of his poetry against the cultural and literary ferment of this century. Albert Gelpi explores in three expansive sections the major periods of the poet's development, beginning with the emergence of Day Lewis in the thirties as the most radical of the Oxford poets. An artist who sought through poetry a way of "living in time" without traditional religious assurances, Day Lewis went further than his friends in seeking to forge a revolutionary poetry out of his commitment to Marxism. When Stalinism led to his resignation from the Communist Party, Day Lewis in the forties went on to shape a rich, fiercely perceptive poetry out of the convergence of the wartime crisis with the explosive events of his own inner life, intensified by the erotics of a decade-long affair. Returning to his Irish roots and meditating on the persistent tension between agnosticism and faith in the work of his third and final period, Day Lewis wrote some of the most moving poems in the language about mortality and dying, the limits and possibilities of human striving. Through the traumatic changes of his life C. Day Lewis came increasingly to depend on the intricacies of poetry itself as a way of living in time. His abiding belief in the psychological and moral functions of poetry impelled him in his critical writings and in his own poetic practice to delineate a modern poetics that presents an effective alternative to the elitist experimentation associated with Modernism. This vital revisionist reading of Day Lewis demonstrates that much of his best work was written after the thirties and establishes him as one of the most significant and accomplished British poets of the modern period.

The Poetic Avant-Garde compares three avant-garde groups active in the era between the world wars: those surrounding Jorge Luis Borges, W.H. Auden, and Andre Breton. These groups were composed of poets and writers who made use of the avant-garde's characteristic modes of self-expression: the publication of small journals, unorthodox attention-getting tactics, and interaction with the mainstream press. However, their differing aesthetic, social, and political agendas illustrate the surprisingly broad range of avant-gardism in the interwar era. Strong looks at the choices these three groups made when their radical goals collided with the forces of social and political change in the 1920s and 1930s, highlighting the disparity between their rhetoric and their actual achievements. The book focuses on the avant-garde's struggle to reconcile contradictory imperatives: a desire to be radically new while also finding an audience.

C. Day-Lewis was one of the leading British poets of the 1930’s, closely associated with his friend W. H. Auden, producing poetry of left-wing political statement and individual lyricism. He worked as Clark lecturer at the University of Cambridge, before serving as Professor of Poetry at Oxford and Norton Professor at Harvard. His poetry career culminated with his appointment as Poet Laureate in 1968, succeeding John Masefield. Under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, he also penned the hugely successful Nigel Strangeways novels, establishing his reputation as one of the leading writers of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. The Delphi Poets Series offers readers the works of literature’s finest poets, with superior formatting. This volume presents Day-Lewis’ complete poetry and thrillers, with related illustrations and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1) * Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Day-Lewis’ life and works * Concise introduction to Day-Lewis’ life and poetry * Images of how the poetry books were first printed, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts * Excellent formatting of the poems * Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the poetry * Easily locate the poems you want to read * Day-Lewis’ complete thrillers, including all of the Nigel Strangeways books * Features rare non-fiction essays, available in no other collection, including the seminal ‘A Hope for Poetry’ * Day-Lewis’ autobiography ‘The Buried Day’, digitised here for the first time — discover his literary life * Ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres CONTENTS: The Life and Poetry of C. Day-Lewis Brief Introduction: C. Day-Lewis Beechen Vigil and Other Poems (1925) Country Comets (1928) Transitional Poem (1929) From Feathers to Iron (1931) The Magnetic Mountain (1933) A Time to Dance and Other Poems (1935) Noah and the Waters (1936) Overtures to Death (1938) Word over All (1943) Poems (1943-1947) An Italian Visit (1953) Pegasus and Other Poems (1957) The Gate and Other Poems (1962) The Room (1965) The Whispering Roots and Other Poems (1970) Miscellaneous Poems The Poems List of Poems in Chronological Order List of Poems in Alphabetical Order The Nigel Strangeways Books A Question of Proof (1935) Thou Shell of Death (1936) There’s Trouble Brewing (1937) The Beast Must Die (1938) The Smiler with the Knife (1939) Malice in Wonderland (1940) The Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941) Minute for Murder (1947) Head of a Traveller (1949) The Dreadful Hollow (1953) The Whisper in the Gloom (1954) End of Chapter (1957) The Widow’s Cruise (1959) The Worm of Death (1961) The Sad Variety (1964) The Morning after Death (1966) Other Novels A Tangled Web (1956) A Penknife in My Heart (1958) The Deadly Joker (1963) The Private Wound (1968) The Non-Fiction A Hope for Poetry (1934) Revolutionaries and Poetry (1935) The Colloquial Element in English Poetry (1947) The Poet’s Way of Knowledge (1956) The Autobiography The Buried Day (1960)