Cecil Day-Lewis

During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the British government's Ministry of Information and also served in the Musbury branch of the Home Guard. He was the father of the actor Sir Daniel Day-Lewis and the chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.

Life and work

Cecil Day-Lewis was born in 1904 in Ballintubbert, Athy/Stradbally border, Queen's County (now known as County Laois), Ireland. He was the son of Frank Day-Lewis, a Church of Ireland rector of that parish, and Kathleen Blake (née Squires; died 1906). Some of his family were from England and the family had originally been from Berkhamsted, in Hertfordshire, and settled in Ireland in the late 1860s. 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."

After the death of his mother in 1906, when he was two years old, Day-Lewis was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with relatives in County Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and then at Wadham College, Oxford, where he became part of the circle gathered around W. H. Auden and helped him to edit Oxford Poetry 1927. Day-Lewis's first collection of poems, Beechen Vigil and other Poems, appeared in 1925.

In 1928 Day-Lewis married Constance Mary King, the daughter of a Sherborne teacher. Day-Lewis worked as a schoolmaster in three schools, including Larchfield School in Helensburgh, Scotland (now Lomond School). During the 1940s he had a long and troubled love affair with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, to whom he dedicated his 1943 poetry collection Word Over All. In 1948 Day-Lewis met the actress Jill Balcon, daughter of Michael Balcon, at the recording of a radio programme and began an affair with her that year. He conducted simultaneous relationships with his wife Constance Mary, who lived with their two sons in Dorset, with Lehmann, who lived in Oxfordshire, and with Balcon. Finally he broke with his wife and Lehmann, and after his marriage was dissolved in 1951, he married Balcon, but he was no more faithful to her than he had been to his wife or Lehmann. Jill's father was deeply unhappy about the scandalous affair since she was named publicly as co-respondent in Day-Lewis' divorce. He disinherited her and cut off all relationships with her and Day-Lewis.

During the Second World War, Day-Lewis worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, an institution satirised by George Orwell in his dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, but equally based on Orwell's experience of the BBC. During the war his work was less influenced by Auden and he was developing a more traditional style of lyricism. Some critics believe that he reached his full stature as a poet in Word Over All (1943), when he finally distanced himself from Auden. After the war, he joined the publisher Chatto & Windus as a director and senior editor.

In 1946 Day-Lewis was a lecturer at Cambridge University, publishing his lectures in The Poetic Image (1947). He was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in the 1950 Birthday Honours. He later taught poetry at the University of Oxford, where he was Professor of Poetry from 1951 to 1956. During 1962–1963, he was the Norton Professor at Harvard University in the United States. He was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1968, in succession to John Masefield. His appointment came after the appointments secretary John Hewitt consulted with Dame Helen Gardner, the Merton Professor of English at Oxford (who said Day-Lewis "produced run of the mill poetry but nothing particularly outstanding") and Geoffrey Handley-Taylor, chair of the Poetry Society (who stated that Day-Lewis was "a good administrative poet" and "a safe bet").

Day-Lewis was chairman of the Arts Council Literature Panel, vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Member of the Irish Academy of Letters and a Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London.

Day-Lewis died of pancreatic cancer on 22 May 1972, aged 68, at Lemmons, the Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, where he and his family were staying. As a great admirer of Thomas Hardy, he had arranged to be buried near Hardy's grave at St Michael's Church in Stinsford, Dorset.

Day-Lewis was the father of four children. His first two, with Constance Mary King, were Sean Day-Lewis (3 August 1931 – 9 June 2022), a television critic and writer, and Nicholas Day-Lewis (born 1934), an engineer. His children with Balcon were Tamasin Day-Lewis (born 1953), a television chef and food critic, and Sir Daniel Day-Lewis (born 1957), an award-winning actor. Sean wrote a biography of his father, C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980). Daniel donated his father's archive of poetry to the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford.