Day-Lewis, Cecil

Day-Lewis, Cecil (1904-1972), was an Irish-born English poet and novelist. In 1968, Queen Elizabeth II appointed him poet laureate of England.

Day-Lewis was born on April 27, 1904, in Ballintogher, near Sligo, and attended Oxford University. In the 1930’s, along with W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender—all friends from Oxford—he gained fame by writing about political and social forces in a direct, informal, and often deliberately vulgar manner. Much of Day-Lewis’s later poetry deals with his Irish heritage and memories of his childhood in Ireland. Day-Lewis’s Collected Poems were published in 1954. His novels include The Friendly Tree (1936) and Starting Point (1937). In 1952, he published a verse translation of Virgil’s epic poem Aeneid. His autobiography, The Buried Day, was published in 1960. Day-Lewis wrote detective stories under the pen name of Nicholas Blake. His son is the British-born Irish actor Daniel Day-Lewis. Cecil Day-Lewis died on May 22, 1972.