C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good. Jacket: Worn/faded - no tears. Page Condition: Good. Markings: No markings. Binding condition: Good — pages intact, binding firm.
Cecil Day-Lewis — poet, novelist, and Poet Laureate of Great Britain — led one of the most richly textured literary lives of the twentieth century, and his son Sean Day-Lewis chronicles that life with intimate authority and scholarly precision. This biography traces the arc of a complex man: from his Irish Protestant upbringing and his passionate flirtation with Marxism in the 1930s, through his celebrated tenure as a detective novelist writing under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, to his eventual appointment as Poet Laureate in 1968. The result is a portrait at once deeply personal and rigorously researched, illuminating the contradictions of a writer who straddled the worlds of high modernism and popular fiction with rare grace. Sean Day-Lewis writes with a son's intimacy and a biographer's restraint, resisting hagiography in favour of honest, nuanced assessment. The book situates C. Day-Lewis firmly within his generation — alongside Auden, Spender, and MacNeice — while arguing for his singular place in the English literary tradition. Readers who believe they know the Poet Laureate will find, beneath the public laureate, a man of private doubts and enduring artistic ambition that refuses easy categorisation.
Author: Sean Day-Lewis
Format: Hardback
Published: 1980, Weidenfeld and Nicolson
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good. Jacket: Worn/faded - no tears. Page Condition: Good. Markings: No markings. Binding condition: Good — pages intact, binding firm.
Cecil Day-Lewis — poet, novelist, and Poet Laureate of Great Britain — led one of the most richly textured literary lives of the twentieth century, and his son Sean Day-Lewis chronicles that life with intimate authority and scholarly precision. This biography traces the arc of a complex man: from his Irish Protestant upbringing and his passionate flirtation with Marxism in the 1930s, through his celebrated tenure as a detective novelist writing under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, to his eventual appointment as Poet Laureate in 1968. The result is a portrait at once deeply personal and rigorously researched, illuminating the contradictions of a writer who straddled the worlds of high modernism and popular fiction with rare grace. Sean Day-Lewis writes with a son's intimacy and a biographer's restraint, resisting hagiography in favour of honest, nuanced assessment. The book situates C. Day-Lewis firmly within his generation — alongside Auden, Spender, and MacNeice — while arguing for his singular place in the English literary tradition. Readers who believe they know the Poet Laureate will find, beneath the public laureate, a man of private doubts and enduring artistic ambition that refuses easy categorisation.