One Dawn to Another

The Gate And Other Poems by C. Day Lewis. Jonathan Cape, 12s.6d.

It is typical of the treatment, or rather the non-treatment, now accorded Day Lewis’ poetry—in this country, at least—that M. L. Rosenthal’s The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction (New York, 1960) discusses no poem written by Day Lewis in the last thirty years; and lists, in its bibliography, nothing but Collected Poems 1929-1933 and A Hope for Poetry, published in New York in 1935. What Rosenthal says about Day Lewis is good enough as far as it goes; but the Left Poet has been superseded by several Day Lewises since then—in three other major volumes of poetry published in the ’30s; in Word Over All (1943); in Poems 1943-1947 (1948); in An Italian Visit (1953); in Pegasus and Other Poems (1957); and in The Gate. Nor should any reader of Day Lewis’ poetry fail to be acquainted with his Clark Lectures for 1946, published as The Poetic Image; the splendid essays on Emily Bronte, Meredith, and Yeats, published under the title Notable Images of Virtue in 1954; and the autobiographical volume The Buried Day (1960). These titles, though they do not by any means indicate all the Day Lewis output, nonetheless suggest something of its bulk—just as a reading of these works will suggest that his importance transcends, even though it does not and should not obscure, that of the angry political poet of three decades ago.