Inspirational Quotes by Cecil Day-Lewis (British Poet, Critic)

Cecil Day-Lewis (1904–72,) pen name C Day-Lewis, was an Irish-born British poet, critic, and detective-story writer. One of the leading British poets of the 1930s and the Poet Laureate 1968–72, he was the father of the English actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

Born in Ballintubbert, County Laois, Day-Lewis was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College-Oxford. He gained a reputation as a lyric poet with Transitional Poems (1929.)

During the 1930s, Day-Lewis connected with W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender at Oxford. Day-Lewis’s From Feathers to Iron (1931) and The Magnetic Mountain (1933) have a strong revolutionary flavor. He became a member of the Communist Party but renounced it in 1939.

During World War II, Day-Lewis worked in the Ministry of Information and published Poetry for You (1944) and his major critical work, The Poetic Image (1947.) He became a professor of poetry at Oxford 1951–56 and Harvard 1964–65 and published his last significant work, The Poetic Impulse (1965.)

Under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, Day-Lewis wrote 20 detective novels, starting with A Question of Proof (1935,) featuring the Audenesque detective Nigel Strangeways. Day-Lewis’s autobiography, The Buried Day, was published in 1960.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Cecil Day-Lewis

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.
—Cecil Day-Lewis
Topics: Creativity, Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing

We’d like to fight but we fear defeat, we’d like to work but we’re feeling too weak, we’d like to be sick but we’d get the sack, we’d like to behave, we’d like to believe, we’d like to love, but we’ve lost the knack.
—Cecil Day-Lewis
Topics: Despair

There’s a kind of release
And a kind of torment in every goodbye for every man.
—Cecil Day-Lewis
Topics: Change

How selfhood begins with a walking away, and love is proved in the letting go.
—Cecil Day-Lewis
Topics: Parenting, Parents

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Inspirational Quotes by Cecil Day-Lewis (British Poet, Critic)

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