Complete Poems

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 establishments 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 poets widow.Day Lewis, poet laureate of England from 1968 to his death...had from early on, in addition to social outrage, a clear lyrical gift and imressive technical mastery. Even his propagandist poems rise above mere didacticsm or their own rhetoric...The Complete Poems shows the poet's development from 1925 to 1972. According to Balcon, the 1954 Collected Poems was not only incomplete but also poorly edited...This new edition is a welcome event, having all of Day Lewis's poetry - 15 books overall - in one place. - ChoiceThe handsome new Complete Poems helps to clarify how the apparatus of the 1920's poet - late Georgian modulations of Keats, fitfully infused with a Yeatsian vigor - came to be adapted to the exigencies of the frontier-conscious new decade. - The Times Literary SupplementDay Lewis could write in any sort of style. Since the Romantic movement we have been so conditioned to the poet who finds and speaks in his own voice that we forget the larger and more ancient tradition of a poetry that is practiced by skill alone...The still lively fascination of his verse seems to depend on the variety of tones he could pick up, change, and discard at will...For anyone who likes poetry there is real interest here in the complete record. - New York Review of Books