Day-Lewis, Cecil. (1904 - 1972).
W o r k
- Poet Laureate (1968 - 1972)
- 1930s: sympathized with Marxism
- 1940s: abandoned the left-wing point of view in his poetry
- 1950s: retreated into a bucolic ideal in his translations of Virgil
The Magnetic Mountain (1933)
A Time to Dance (1935):
> “A Time to Dance”:
- a heroic celebration of the pioneer airmen
> “A Carol”:
- a sardonic lullaby on England suffering under Depression
> “An Address to Death”:
- a socialist poem urging for revolution
> “In Me Two Worlds”:
- an ambiguous poem: the poet finds himself on a battlefield with the past and the future meeting to fight
Overtures to Death (1939)
Poems in Wartime (1940):
> “Regency Houses”:
- the faded elegance of a 19th century terrace as a metaphor for condemned bourgeois society x for the disillusion with revolution
Quote
"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."
From "The Magnetic Mountain" (1933).
Basics
(Photo: BBC).
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Author
Cecil Day-Lewis. (1904 - 1972). British. -
Work
Poet. Translator. Author of A Time to Dance (1935). -
Genre
Left-wing poetry in 1930s.
Literature
Abrams, Meyer Howard, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Barnard, Robert. Stručné dějiny anglické literatury. Praha: Brána, 1997.
Baugh, Albert C. ed. A Literary History of England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
Coote, Stephen. The Penguin Short History of English Literature. London: Penguin, 1993.
Sampson, George. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946.
Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994.