In Auden's Shadow: Michael Roberts

Michael Roberts (1902-1948)

I used to try to buy any stray volumes of collected poems I ran across in bookshops, on the off-chance that I'd be lucky enough to locate some submerged genius who nobody else knew about. This policy had somewhat mixed success, I must admit.

One of the most interesting such books I bought, however, was Michael Roberts' Collected Poems, way back in the 1980s sometime.

Michael Roberts: Collected Poems (1958)

I didn't know anything much about him. It was a handsome Faber volume, with an introduction by the editor, his widow Janet Roberts - somewhat better known under her maiden name of Janet Adam Smith, a distinguished contributor to Scottish literature in her own right.

Janet Roberts (née Adam Smith) (1905-1999)

Here's one of the poems from the book:

The Caves


This is the cave of which I spoke,
These are the blackened stones, and these
Our footprints, seven lives ago.

Darkness was in the cave like shifting smoke,
Stalagmites grew like equatorial tree,
There was a pool, quite black and silent, seven lives ago

Here such a one turned back, and there
Another stumbled and his nerve gave out;
Men have escaped blindly, they know not how.

Our candles gutter in the mouldering air,
Here the rock fell, beyond a doubt,
There was no light in those days, and there is none now.

Water drips from the roof, and the caves narrow,
Galleries lead downward to the unknown dark;
This was the point we reached, the farthest known.

Here someone in the debris found an arrow,
Men have been here before, and left their mark
Scratched on the limestone wall with splintered bone.

Here the dark word was said for memory’s sake,
And lost, here on the cold sand, to the puzzled brow.

This was the farthest point, the fabled lake:
These were our footprints, seven lives ago.

Michael Roberts (1902-1948)

There was a sort of studied simplicity about the diction: a concreteness and sureness of touch. The subject matter was interesting, too: lots about mountains, caves, climbing ... though I think the section of the book I liked best was his late sequence of poems about Chinghis [Genghis] Khan.

Chingiz Khan: The Life and Legacy of an Empire Builder (2010)

I guess that this must have been intended for broadcast on the radio, though I didn't realise that at the time. There were a lot of stage directions and details about the various voices the narrative was filtered through. It had an undeniable power to it, though:

Coda


Tchirek River runs
Under the Dark Mountain
Where the sky is like the sides of a tent
Stretched down over the Great Steppe.

The sky is grey, grey,
And the steppe is wide, wide:
Over grass the wind has battered low,
Sheep and cattle roam.

You can say that it's a bit like Matsuo Bashō's famous haiku:

Summer grasses,
All that remains
Of warriors' dreams

or, for that matter, Carl Sandburg's rather more protracted version of the same basic idea, "Grass":

I am the grass.
Let me work.

and that would certainly be true, and yet there's something extra there in Michael Roberts' poem - something about that evocation of the mountains, the steppe and the river which persuades us that he's been there - that there's nothing second-hand about his inspiration, however much it may recall other expressions of the same thought.

One thing's for certain. He doesn't sound anything like Auden - or like anybody else, really, except himself.

A. T. Tolley: The Poetry of the Thirties (1975)

All of that, of course, was before I worked out what he was really famous for. You have to remember that these were the days before the internet, before Google and Wikipedia. All I really had to go on was the disconcertingly brief and gnomic entries in our copy of the latest (1975) edition of Oxford Companion to English Literature.

Robin Skelton, ed.: Poetry of the Thirties (1975)

So, it seems that some time in the early thirties Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press was approached by a young schoolteacher, mountaineer (and ex-communist) called Michael Roberts who tried to sell them on the idea of a short anthology designed to show just what the new young poets beginning to emerge were getting up to.

The fact that one of the writers on the list was Virginia's ne'er-do-well nephew Julian Bell might well have been one of the factors that motivated them to agree.

Michael Roberts, ed.: New Signatures (1932)

New Signatures: Poems by Several Hands. London: Hogarth Press, 1932:
[W. H. Auden, Julian Bell, C. Day-Lewis, Richard Eberhart, William Empson, John Lehmann, William Plomer, Stephen Spender, A. S. J. Tessimond]

This was the result. It's quite a strange list, in retrospect: no MacNeice - and the choice of A. S. J. Tessimond may already have seemed a bit eccentric.

Nevertheless, it's probably better to concentrate on the successes than the failures. Auden was hardly known at the time. He'd only published one commercial collection: Poems (1930) - apart from a privately printed pamphlet produced by Stephen Spender on his handpress at home. The Orators was not yet out; nor was The Dance of Death.

Nor had Spender himself published a collection as yet. Only Day-Lewis had much under his belt, and he would later come to regard his three collections from the 1920s as mostly juvenilia. Roberts had published only one book of poems himself - and was probably best known for his reviews he and his wife had started to contribute to T. S. Eliot's Criterion.

Not all the reviewers were convinced. The young American poet T. C. Wilson [who he? - ed.] was content to remark: "the disparity between the intention and the published work is substantial."

Nevertheless, other reviewers and readers sat up and took notice of (in particular) Roberts's polemical introduction, in which he asserted 'that the modern poet could no longer write like Keats, rather he must take his imagery from urban and industrial civilization and "be abreast of his own times"' [cf Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-war Britain (2002): 160 et seq.].

Michael Roberts, ed.: New Country: Prose and Poetry (1933)

New Country: Prose and Poetry by the authors of New Signatures. London: Hogarth Press, 1933:
[W. H. Auden, Richard Goodman, C. Day-Lewis, John Lehmann, Charles Madge, Michael Roberts, Stephen Spender, A. S. J. Tessimond, Rex Warner]

A year later, Roberts put out another, larger volume, offering both 'Prose and Poetry by the authors of New Signatures.' You'll note a few additions to the line-up: Richard Goodman, Charles Madge, and our old friend Rex Warner.

This was an even greater success, and led Eliot to commission a rather more substantial exercise in canon-building, one of the most influential poetry anthologies of the twentieth century, reprinted - in various versions - to this day, The Faber Book of Modern Verse:

Michael Roberts, ed.: The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936)

Michael Roberts, ed.: The Faber Book of Modern Verse. 2nd ed. rev. Anne Ridler (1951)

Michael Roberts, ed.: The Faber Book of Modern Verse. 3rd ed. rev. Donald Hall (1965)

Michael Roberts, ed.: The Faber Book of Modern Verse. 4th ed. rev. Peter Porter (1982)

Michael Roberts, ed.: The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1982)

[A reissue of the original edition with an account of its making by Janet Adam Smith]

As you can see, the book has continued to be read from that day to this. It undoubtedly marks the high water mark of Roberts' influence, and of his publishing career. He continued to edit anthologies and publish poetry and books on science and current affairs, but the authors he'd been so successful in introducing to the public gaze went on to surpass him.

Anthony Burgess's much-thumbed copy of The Faber Book of Modern Verse

Like Louis MacNeice - and, for that matter, George Orwell - Roberts spent most of the war working for the BBC, broadcasting mainly to German-occupied countries. After the war he took up the post of Principal of the College of St Mark and St John in Chelsea, London. He died of leukaemia in 1948. His Collected Poems appeared, finally, a decade later.

So will he be remembered principally as an influential antbologist who also scribbled verse in his spare time, or as a poet who got diverted (briefly) into acting as the 'spokesperson for a generation'? Your guess is as good as mine. I suppose that it depends largely on whether you first encountered his work through the Faber Book of Modern Verse, or through the Collected Poems.

I read his poems before I read all those thirties-agenda-setting introductions, so I think of him mainly as a poet: a lover of the mountains and the open air, more at home on a cliff-face than a lecture room.

I, too, have had more success editing anthologies than through my own published collections of poems, so I suppose the answer is more important to me than it might be to most people. I can't help believing, though, that the work that you do can end up in unpredictable places, and I've taken much inspiration from the curt, cut-back idiom and concrete, tangible subject-matter of Michael Roberts.

Perhaps, as usual, it's best to allow the poet himself the last word:

On Reading Some Neglected Poets


This is a long road in a dubious mist;
Not with any groan nor any heard complaint
We march, uncomprehending, not expecting Time
To show us beacons.

When we have struggled on a little farther
This madness will yield of itself,
There will not be any singing or sudden joy,
But a load will be set down.

And maybe no one will ever come,
No other traveller passing that way,
Therefore the load we lifted will be left,
A milestone, insignificant.

Michael Roberts: The Recovery of the West (1941)

•


Michael Roberts (1946)

Michael William Edward Roberts (1902-1948)

[titles I own are marked in bold]:

Poetry:


1. These Our Matins. London: Elkin Mathews & Marrot, 1930.
2. Poems. London: Jonathan Cape, 1936.
3. Orion Marches. London: Faber & Faber, 1939.
4. Collected Poems. Introductory Memoir by Jane Roberts. London: Faber, 1958.

Prose:


5. [with E. R. Thomas] Newton and the Origin of Colours: A Study of One of the Earliest Examples of Scientific Method. London: G. Bell, 1934.
6. Critique of Poetry. London: Jonathan Cape, 1934.
7. The Modern Mind. London: Faber & Faber, 1937.
8. T. E. Hulme. London: Faber & Faber, 1938.
9. The Recovery of the West. London: Faber & Faber, London, 1941.
10. The Estate of Man. London: Faber & Faber, London, 1951.

Edited:


11. New Signatures: Poems by Several Hands. London: Hogarth Press, 1932:
    [W. H. Auden, Julian Bell, C. Day-Lewis, Richard Eberhart, William Empson, John Lehmann, William Plomer, Stephen Spender, A. S. J. Tessimond]
12. New Country: Prose and Poetry by the authors of New Signatures. London: Hogarth Press, 1933:
    [W. H. Auden, Richard Goodman, C. Day-Lewis, John Lehmann, Charles Madge, Michael Roberts, Stephen Spender, A. S. J. Tessimond, Rex Warner]
13. Elizabethan Prose. London: Jonathan Cape, 1933.
14. The Faber Book of Modern Verse. 1936. Second Edition, revised by Anne Ridler. 1960. London: Faber, 1962.
15. The Faber Book of Comic Verse. London: Faber & Faber, 1942.

Michael Roberts, ed.: The Faber Book of Comic Verse (1942)

In Auden's Shadow: Rex Warner

Rex Warner (1905-1986)

The first person I thought of when I came up with this overall topic of writers languishing (or flourishing - who knows?) under Auden's shadow, was Rex Warner.

When I was a teenager I bought a second-hand copy of Warner's novel The Aerodrome (1941), and was suprised to observe that it came from a 'uniform edition' of his works.

Rex Warner: The Aerodrome: A Love Story (1941)

Some of the comments on the blurb were intriguing, too. He was, it seems (according to V. S. Pritchett), 'the only outstanding novelist of ideas whom the decade of ideas has produced' and the comments about his other books made it clear that they, too, had been considered of major significance at the time.

The Aerodrome (Uniform Edition): blurb (1946)

The only Rex Warner I knew about was a translator and occasional commentator on Greek texts and culture. I had a copy of his version of Caesar's commentaries - conveniently, if unconventionally, transposed from the third person into the first. I also had his Penguin Classics translation of Thucydides.

Caesar: War Commentaries, trans. Rex Warner (1960)

Who, then, was this earlier Rex Warner, this eloquent critic of fascism, this author of a series of odd, symbolic texts which seemed to have run in parallel with much of the early work of Auden and his friends - The Wild Goose Chase (1937) with Auden & Isherwood's bizarre charade-play The Dog Beneath the Skin:

Rex Warner: The Wild Goose Chase (1937)

W. H. Auden & Christopher Isherwood: The Dog Beneath the Skin, or Where is Francis? (1935)

The Professor (1938) with Spender's play Trial of a Judge:

Rex Warner: The Professor (1938)

Stephen Spender: Trial of a Judge: A Tragic Statement in Five Acts (1938)

Why Was I Killed? (1943) with MacNeice's Group Theatre extravaganza Out of the Picture?

Rex Warner: Why Was I Killed?: A Dramatic Dialogue (1943)

Louis MacNeice: Out of the Picture (1937)

Rex Warner began, as novelists so often do, as a poet rather than a prose-writer. Remember those lines from C. Day Lewis's The Magnetic Mountain (1933) I quoted above, in the first of these posts?

Then I'll hit the trail for that promising land;
May catch up with Wystan and Rex my friend ...

Rex Warner: Poems (1937)

It wasn't till four years afterwards that he finally broke into print with his own verse. Here are a couple of samples:

Rex Warner: 'Sonnet'. Poems (1937), p.11.

Sonnet


How sweet only to delight lambs and laugh by streams,
innocent in love wakening to the early thrush,
to be wed by mountains, and feel the stars friendly,
to be a farmer's boy, to be far from battle.

But me my blood binds to remember men
more than the birds, not to be delicate with squirrels,
or gloat among the poppies in a mass of corn,
or follow in a maze endless unwinding of water.

Nor will my mind permit me to linger in the love,
the motherkindness of country among ascending trees,
knowing that love must be liberated by bleeding,
fearing for my fellows, for the murder of man.

How should I live then but as a kind of fungus,
or else as one in strict training for desperate war?

Note the prevalence of alliteration - a device brought back into popularity by Auden's predilection for Anglo-Saxon verse: "Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle. / Upon what man it fall. ..."

Note, too, the clipped, slightly awkward diction: another sign of the deep influence of his younger contemporary on his writing. The poem might as well have been titled 'Audenesque'. Sonnets composed in simple, prosaic language, too, were another favourite device of Auden's.

Having said that, the poem is not without interest in the severe psychological traumas it tries to explore. Who, in 1937, did not feel themselves 'in strict training for desperate war'?

Rex Warner: 'Light and Air'. Poems (1937), p. 19.

Light and Air


Our private vision is death, and the seers are yellow
who saw something remarkable in the dark,
who left the gas turned on, but never lit it,
and innocently withdrew before the explosion,
only too glad to forgive everyone.

Broken fragments are left, pieces of pottery,
fragments of a branch or frond for the microscope,
groups seen for an instant in indistinct light,
sometimes a curious smell outside the window.

We sometimes raise our heads from the window sill.
We sometimes venture to the ruinous door;
in the creaking house we demand light and air;

for what we need most is an atmosphere
fit to be breathed, and light by which to see.

The Auden influence is strong on this one, too. But here one might almost see Warner's preoccupation with the 'curious smell outside the window' as prophetic of Auden's later lines, in 'September 1, 1939':

The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night

The Wild Goose Chase: blurb

That same year, 1937, saw the publication of Warner's first novel, a rather bizarre allegorical mishmash called The Wild Goose Chase.

Clearly, judging by the blurb above, his publishers had high hopes of the book, and while it hasn't really stood the test of time as much as some of his later work, the same could easily be said of similarly mad creations of the thirties mindset as Auden's The Orators (1932) - or, for that matter, C. S. Lewis's allegorical novel The Pilgrim's Regress (1933):

C. S. Lewis: The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933)

Here's the verse dedication Warner wrote for the book:

The Wild Goose Chase: Dedication

Wild Goose, I made you a symbol of our Saviour,
With your fierce indifference to bye-laws and quiet flying,
your unearthly song, your neck like thunder and lightning,
and your mysterious barbaric love.

O missionaries and motor-cyclists!
Let us at daybreak honour the flying host,
the yelping hounds of air who, with blood for essence,
thrust like live shells through the speedways of heaven
above low coasts, over bed of rotting weed.

By light-houses, through showers of ice, listen
suddenly for onrush of wings, or from the storm
the bell-like note of an outriding voice.

This makes clear the basically Christian perspective he was working from at the time, as well as his continuing devotion to Auden's stylistic tropes: that mention of 'motor-cyclists', for instance, surely recalls Auden's 1930 poem 'Consider This'?

Consider this and in our time
As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman

There's more there than just Auden, though. For the first time, I think, we catch a distinct echo of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

It's important to remember, in this connection, that - while we (rightly) consider Hopkins as a nineteenth-century poet, his collected verse was only published by his friend Robert Bridges in 1918, after the First World War.

Robert Bridges, ed.: Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Rev. Charles Williams (1930)

Bridges, Robert, ed. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. 1918. Second Edition With an Appendix of Additional Notes, and a Critical Introduction by Charles Williams. 1930. The Oxford Bookshelf. 1937. London: Oxford University Press, 1941.

Charles Williams' second, enlarged edition appeared in 1930, just in time to exert a decisive influence on all of the thirties poets - especially Rex Warner's close friend, Cecil Day Lewis:

Rex Warner: The Converts: blurb

All of which brings us, by a a commodius vicus of recirculation back to The Aerodrome, his third and still most celebrated novel. Like Auden's The Orators, which it resembles in many ways, it's an allegorical / satirical account of Fascism - what a distinctly English brand of it might look like, and the aspects of English life which already tend in that direction:

W. H. Auden: The Orators: An English Study (1932)

Anthony Burgess, in the blurb I've reproduced above, describes it as 'the best, perhaps the only, English Kafka novel.' In his own introduction to a later reprint, he goes further and claims that: 'its value as literature becomes increasingly apparent at each rereading:

Rex Warner: The Aerodrome: A Love Story (1941)

Maybe you had to be there. For me, it reads more like various other 'symbolic' works of the late thirties and early forties - Ernst Jünger's Auf den Marmorklippen [On the Marble Cliffs], for instance:

Ernst Jünger: On the Marble Cliffs (1939)

Or, for that matter, Alfred Kubin's pre-First World War account of a weird journey to the depths of the unconscious mind, Die andere Seite [The Other Side]:

Alfred Kubin: The Other Side (19008)

I don't myself see much of Kafka there. Rex Warner's inspiration seems far more matter-of-fact than that to me, though perhaps the posthumour Amerika comes as close as anything.

Rex Warner: Julius Caesar: The Young Caesar & Imperial Caesar. 1958 & 1960 (1967)

For me, I'm afraid, the really readable and durable part of Warner's oeuvre comes in his later historical novels about such figures as St. Augustine, Julius Caesar and Pericles the Athenian. Each of these seems lively and interesting to me in a very original way - far beyond any conventional 'novelisation' of their respective careers.

Rex Warner: Pericles the Athenian (1963)

I'd go so far as to say, in fact, that his only real rival in this field is the great Mary Renault, re-inventor of Ancient Greece for the love generation.

Mary Renault: The Last of the Wine (1956)

It's true that Renault's own homosexuality adds a passionate polemic dimension to these alleged 'recreations' of Ancient Greek mores - and incidentally guarantees the continuing value of her work - but Rex Warner runs her a close second in his vivid sense of what it might have been to be alive then.

Nor is his own work bereft of passion. Take, for example, this piece from his 1945 collection Poems and Contradictions:

Whether love leaping to love as loose as fishes,
sand-sensitive, hot and delicate as a moth,
or whether with crushing load and slavering mouth
on impassive flesh, and hate trembling the lashes,
or whether as customary, and without fuss
that seed slid in the membrane and found a home
in the throbbing darkness of the impulsive womb,
that seed lodged firm and mastered all the mass;
and knew no love but to take toll of blood,
dreaming the dream of creepers or of fish,
limpet or saurian, the start of man,
fastened and fettered by a string to food,
by love or lust or duty framed in flesh,
growing in bulk, and groping into pain.

One thing seems certain. While his novels and stories may never be the first thing to leap to mind when you think of the thirties writers - or, for that matter, when you think of post-war classicists - anyone willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and actually pick up one of his excellent books will not find it disappointing.

Here is one case where a revival is, I firmly believe, long overdue. I haven't read the biography yet, by his student Stephen Tabachnick, but it seems to have been quite well reviewed.

Julius Caesar: blurb

•


The Professor (Penguin edition): blurb (1945)

Rex Warner
(1905-1986)

[titles I own are marked in bold]:

Poetry:


1. Poems. London: Boriswood Limited, 1937.
2. Poems and Contradictions (1945)
3. New Poems 1954 (with Laurie Lee and Christopher Hassall) (1954)




Rex Warner: The Converts: A Novel of Early Christianity (1967)


Fiction:


4. The Wild Goose Chase: A Novel. London: Boriswood Limited, 1937.
5. The Professor: A Novel. 1938. Penguin Books 482. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945.
6. The Aerodrome. 1941. Uniform Edition. London: John Lane / The Bodley Head Ltd., 1946.
7. Why Was I Killed? A Dramatic Dialogue. London: John Lane / The Bodley Head Ltd., 1943.
8. Men of Stones: A Melodrama (1949)
9. Escapade (1953)
10. Julius Caesar: A One-Volume Edition of the Two Novels The Young Caesar and Imperial Caesar. 1958 & 1960. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1967.
11. Pericles the Athenian. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1963.
12. The Converts: A Novel of Early Christianity. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1967.




George Sefers: On the Greek Style, introduction by Rex Warner (1967)


Translations:


13. Xenophon. The Persian Expedition. 1949. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952.
14. Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. 1954. Ed. M. I. Finley. 1972. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
15. Plutarch. Fall of the Roman Republic. 1958. Ed. Robin Seager. 1972. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
16. Caesar. War Commentaries. Mentor Books. New York: New American Library, 1960.
17. Seferis, George. On the Greek Style: Selected Essays in Poetry and Hellenism. Trans. with Th. D. Frangopoulos. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1966.
18. Xenophon. A History of My Times (Hellenica). 1966. Ed. George Cawkwell. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
19. Plutarch. Moral Essays. Ed. P. A. Russell. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.




Rex Warner: The Stories of the Greeks (1967)


Miscellaneous:


20. Men and Gods. 1950. Penguin Books 885. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952.
21. Greeks and Trojans. 1951. Penguin Books 942. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953.
22. Cavafy, C. P. Poems. Trans. John Mavrogordato. Introduction by Rex Warner. 1951. London: Chatto & Windus, 1974.
23. The Stories of the Greeks: Men and Gods / Greeks and Trojans / The Vengeance of the Gods. 1951, 1953, 1955. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1967.
24. The Greek Philosophers. 1958. A Mentor Book. New York: New American Library, 1963.




Stephen Ely Tabachnick: Fiercer Than Tigers: The Life and Work of Rex Warner (2002)


Secondary:


25. Stephen Ely Tabachnick: Fiercer Than Tigers: The Life and Work of Rex Warner. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002.

Rex Warner: Men and Gods / Greeks and Trojans (1950-51)

In Auden's Shadow: Cecil Day-Lewis

Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972)

There's a reason why the name may seem familiar to you. Yes, Cecil Day-Lewis was the father of triple Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis. If you look carefully, you can see the family resemblance:

Daniel Day-Lewis (1957- )

It would be a shame if this fact were allowed to obscure Day-Lewis's own achievements, though, which were many and various - some have said a little too various:

Greenwich Society: Memorial Tree (1973)

• C. Day-Lewis (his preferred version of the name - though he often wrote it 'Day Lewis,' which has caused a certain confusion among critics and bibliographers) was the UK Poet Laureate from 1967, when John Masefield died, until his own death in 1972, when John Betjeman succeeded him.





C. Day-Lewis: The Otterbury Incident (1948)



• As well as writing numerous novels under his own name, including the children's classic The Otterbury Incident (1948), Day-Lewis was probably most celebrated for a series of 20-odd detective thrillers written under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake between 1935 and 1968. He claimed that he'd originally based his detective 'Nigel Strangeways' on certain character traits of W. H. Auden's, but the resemblance grew less and less marked over time.





'Nicholas Blake': The Widow's Cruise (1959)



• Like Louis MacNeice, Day-Lewis was a classical scholar, and took twenty years (1940-63) to complete one of the most celebrated modern translations of the complete works of Virgil.





C. Day-Lewis, trans. The Aeneid of Virgil (1953)



• Charles Causley's claim that he was 'the greatest lyric poet of the twentieth century' certainly remains a minority view but, though such early poems as his 1933 Magnetic Mountain sequence are probably still the most quoted, his reputation as a latter-day pastoralist ensures him a hearing even now.

C. Day-Lewis: The Poetry Archive

And, speaking of early poems, here's one from his 1938 book Overtures to Death, published - like MacNeice's Autumn Journal - under the shadow of Munich and Chamberlain's promise of 'peace in our time':

Newsreel

Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leaving
Your debts asleep, your history at the door:
This is the home for heroes, and this loving
Darkness a fur you can afford.

Fish in their tank electrically heated
Nose without envy the glass wall: for them
Clerk, spy, nurse, killer, prince, the great and the defeated,
Move in a mute day-dream.

Bathed in this common source, you gape incurious
At what your active hours have willed -
Sleep-walking on that silver wall, the furious
Sick shapes and pregnant fancies of your world.

There is the mayor opening the oyster season:
A society wedding: the autumn hats look swell:
An old crocks' race, and a politician
In fishing-waders to prove that all is well.

Oh, look at the warplanes! Screaming hysteric treble
In the low power-dive, like gannets they fall steep.
But what are they to trouble -
These silver shadows - to trouble your watery, womb-deep sleep?

See the big guns, rising, groping, erected
To plant death in your world's soft womb.
Fire-bud, smoke-blossom, iron seed projected -
Are these exotics? They will grow nearer home!

Grow nearer home - and out of the dream-house stumbling
One night into a strangling air and the flung
Rags of children and thunder of stone niagaras tumbling,
You'll know you slept too long.

The Auden influence is still apparent here: the somewhat heavy-handed politics combined with an undeniable lyric precision. This is the Macspaunday side of Day-Lewis: Marxist on the surface but Georgian underneath.

And here, a few years later, from Word Over All (1943), is a lyric which could easily find a place alongside A. E. Housman's 'Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries':

Where are the War Poets? (1943)

They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom's cause.

It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse -
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse.

Cecil Day-Lewis

So who exactly was Cecil Day-Lewis? He's often referred to as an 'Anglo-Irish' poet, due to the fact that he was born, and lived till the age of 2, in Ballintubbert, Queen's County, Ireland. His clergyman father moved to London in 1906, and Day-Lewis was brought up there, albeit continuing to spend summer holidays with his relatives in County Wexford.

The slight schizophrenia of this shared English and Irish heritage continued throughout his life:

His father took the surname "Day-Lewis" as a combination of his own birth father's ("Day") and adoptive father's ("Lewis") surnames. In his autobiography The Buried Day (1960), Day-Lewis wrote, "As a writer I do not use the hyphen in my surname – a piece of inverted snobbery which has produced rather mixed results."

- Wikipedia

C. Day-Lewis: The Buried Day (1960)

Which brings me to the subject of autobiographies. I promised to comment on the biographies available for each of the writers in this series, but their own accounts of their lives undoubtedly also deserve some comment.

C. Day-Lewis: The Buried Day (1980)

As well as the Day-Lewis book mentioned above, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice both wrote autobiographies, World within World (1951) and The Strings are False (1941), respectively.

Louis MacNeice: The Strings are False (1941 / 1965)

I've already included some quotes from Spender's autobiography in my post on him. Louis MacNeice's autobiography was written early in the war, in 1941, but not published until after his death, in 1965. It was, I suppose, too nakedly revealing of his own complex relationship with 'Irishness' - and with his own work - to be released during his lifetime.

Sean Day-Lewis: C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980)

When it comes to biographies, the situation is a little more complex.

The standard life was written by Sean, one of two sons by Day-Lewis's first marriage - to Constance Mary King. There's a certain (understandable) amount of family rancour visible there, given that his second wife, actress Jill Balcon, was a considerably more glamorous figure, and it was the children of this match who achieved fame.

Be that as it may, it's a competently written book, by a well-known journalist, and fleshes out the information in his father's own more impressionistic account.

The fact is, though, for all his fame and undoubted literary success, C. Day-Lewis is now a largely forgotten figure. There's a tradition of burying or otherwise commemorating Poet Laureates in Westminster Abbey. John Betjeman, his successor in the job, made it - Day-Lewis did not.

Unfortunately a more recent biography, by Peter Stanford - which I must confess I haven't yet read - has (according to reviewers, at any rate) failed to make a very strong case for revived interest in him.

Peter Stanford: C. Day-Lewis: A Life (2007)

Perhaps his admirers can take comfort in a 1963 letter from W. H. Auden:

How delighted I was to find your later poetry so much finer than your earlier ... The critics, of course, think our lot stopped writing 25 years ago. How silly they are going to look presently.

The most endearing anecdote I myself have heard about Day-Lewis concerns his last days, spent at Lemmons, the Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard. Amis had to be forbidden from entering the sick room, as the Poet Laureate found his conversation so amusing that he would end up laughing uncontrollably, thus putting his health in jeopardy. Not such a bad way to go, perhaps, literally laughing yourself to death ...

HIs widow, Jill Balcon, continued to hope for a revival till she herself died in 2009:

I think he's still on the schools' curriculum, but he has come into some sort of obscurity that I cannot quite fathom.

When she gave performances of his work, she noticed that most of the comments and letters she received concerned his poem 'Walking Away.'

A lot of people identify with it. It is about letting a child go. In this case it was his son, Sean, going off to school, but everybody who is a parent identifies with the moment when the children have to go. I wept when my son went to kindergarten for heaven's sake. He was only four, but I knew that forever and ever he would be going to school, to college, to marry and all the things they do.

Perhaps, then. that's as good a place to end as any:

Walking Away

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

His poetry is now available in full in the magnificent edition below. If there ever is a revival, at least it will be readily accessible to anyone who takes an interest in an old-fashioned nature poet: a stance which now seems more timely than ever.

C. Day-Lewis: Complete Poems (1992)

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C. Day-Lewis: Collected Poems 1954 (1970)

Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972)

[titles I own are marked in bold]:

Poetry:


1. Beechen Vigil (1925)
2. Country Comets (1928)
3. Transitional Poem (1929)
4. From Feathers to Iron (1931)
5. The Magnetic Mountain (1933)
6. Collected Poems 1929–1933 (1935)
7. A Time to Dance (1935)
8. Noah and the Waters (1936)
9. Overtures to Death (1938)
10. Word Over All (1943)
11. Short is the Time (1945)
12. Poems 1943-47 (1948)
13. Poems: A Selection by the Author. 1951. The Penguin Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957.
14. An Italian Visit (1953)
15. Christmas Eve. Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. Ariel Poem. London: Faber, 1954.
16. Collected Poems. 1954. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970.
17. Pegasus (1957)
18. The Gate (1962)
19. The Room (1965)
20. The Whispering Roots (1970)
21. Posthumous Poems (1979)
22. The Complete Poems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.

Translation:


23. Virgil's Georgics (1940)
24. Paul Valéry's Le Cimetière Marin (1946)
25. The Aeneid. 1952. Appreciation by John Pollard. Original Illustrations by David Whitfield. Books That Have Changed Men’s Thinking. Geneva: Heron Books, 1969.
26. Virgil's Eclogues (1963)
27. The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil. 1940, 1952, 1963. Oxford Paperbacks. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Non-fiction:


28. A Hope for Poetry (1934)
29. Poetry for You: A Book for Boys and Girls on the Enjoyment of Poetry. 1944. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957.
30. The Poetic Image. 1947. Jonathan Cape Paperback JCP 25. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1965.
31. The Buried Day (1960)

Fiction:


32. Dick Willoughby (1933)
33. The Friendly Tree (1936)
34. Starting Point (1937)
35. Child of Misfortune (1939)
36. The Otterbury Incident. Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. 1948. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.

[as 'Nicholas Blake]:


37. A Question of Proof (1935)
38. Thou Shell of Death (1936)
39. There's Trouble Brewing (1937)
40. The Beast Must Die (1938)
41. The Smiler with the Knife (1939)
42. Malice in Wonderland (1940)
43. The Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941)
44. Minute for Murder (1947)
45. Head of a Traveller (1949)
46. The Dreadful Hollow (1953)
47. The Whisper in the Gloom (1954)
48. A Tangled Web (1956)
49. End of Chapter (1957)
50. A Penknife in My Heart (1958)
51. The Widow's Cruise (1959)
52. The Worm of Death (1961)
53. The Deadly Joker (1963)
54. The Sad Variety (1964)
55. The Morning after Death (1966)
56. The Private Wound (1968)

Edited:


57. [with L. A. G. Strong] A New Anthology of Modern Verse 1920–1940 (1941)
58. Robert Frost. Selected Poems. Introduction by C. Day Lewis. The Penguin Poets. 1955. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962.
59. [with John Lehmann] The Chatto Book of Modern Poetry 1915–1955 (1956)
60. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. 1963. With a Memoir by Edmund Blunden. A Chatto & Windus Paperback CWP 18. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1977.

Secondary:


61. Sean Day-Lewis. C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life. 1980. Unwin Paperbacks. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1982.

Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972)