Poet, translator of classical texts , novelist, detective writer (under the pen-name Nicholas Blake), performer and, at that time , Professor of Poetry at Oxford, C Day-Lewis had many careers all at once. This first authorized biography tells the private story behind the many headlines that this handsome Anglo-Irish Poet Laureate generated in his lifetime. Day-Lewis made his name as one of the 'poets of the 1930s', launching a communist-influenced poetic revolution alongside W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender that aspired to spark wholesale political change to face down fascism. In the 1940s, 'Red Cecil', as he had become known, broke with communism, and with Auden. He went on to produce some of his most popular and enduring verse, reflecting both on the course of the Second World War and on the breakdown of his first marriage. Day-Lewis was always pulled between a fulfilling domestic life and a restless desire to explore. His travels, his infidelities and his reflections on his Irish roots are all part of the rich and many-faceted life that Peter Stanford describes. It is, however, as a poet that he is best remembered, and the poetry itself, often autobiographical, forms an integral part of this biography.

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.

This book - a most important and original contribution to the literature of interpretative criticism -contains the Clark Lectures delivered at Cambridge University in 1946. Its theme is poetic imagery, not only in its stricter sense of simile, metaphor and image, but in the wider application of the term, by which every good poem is itself a total image made up of a multiplicity of component images. The book is therefore more than an academic study of one aspect of poetic material and technique: it is an investigation into the nature of poetry itself, taking as its clue the belief, as old as Aristotle, that the power of image-making is the one sure sign of poetic genius. Beneath all the manifestations of the poetic image, Mr. Day Lewis traces one principle at work - the ' abiding impulse in every human being to seek order and harmony behind the manifold and the changing'.

A selection of the prose writings of the poet and novelist Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-72), poet laureate and Oxford professor of poetry, who published more than twenty volumes of poetry in his lifetime.

No detailed description available for "The Lyric Impulse".

A witty, appealing, and often outrageous portrait of some of the twentieth century's most influential and creative minds Subtitled "An Education in the Twenties," Lions and Shadows blends autobiography and fiction to describe the inner life of a writer evolving from precocious schoolboy to Cambridge dropout-at-large in London's bohemia. It contains thinly veiled portraits of Christopher Isherwood's contemporaries W. H. Auden, Edward Upward, and Stephen Spender, whose intimate friendships and cult of rebellion shaped the literary identity of England in the 1930s. Witty and outrageous, Isherwood pokes fun at the stars of his generation, above all himself, even as he testifies to their unique early gifts.