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 volume contains all of Owen's best known work, only four of which were published in his lifetime. His war poems were based on his acute observations of the soldiers with whom he served on the Western front, and reflect the horror and waste of World War One.

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.

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.

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