Where Are The War Poets? by Bernard O'Donoghue

Bernard O’Donoghue gave this address at an event organised by Wadham College, Oxford, C Day-Lewis’s alma mater, during 2004 to mark the centenary of the poet’s birth. His widow, Jill, and son, Daniel, were in the audience. It then appeared in the January-February 2005 edition of PNR and is reproduced by kind permission of Bernard O’Donoghue.

Cecil Day Lewis was one of the major figures in twentieth-century English poetry by any public measure. He was Poet Laureate; Oxford Professor of Poetry; a Companion of the Royal Society of Literature. He was universally recognized as one of the leading figures in English poetry across five decades, from the 1930s to the 1970s, as well as a ‘great translator’, to borrow Deschamps’s praise of Chaucer: certainly the one of the best translators into English poetry of his century.

So why on earth was he denied his place of honour in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey? I think I know the answer; but I will work round to it by degrees. To begin with, my title comes from one of Day Lewis’s most admired anthology-pieces (included for example by Philip Larkin in his Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse), the poem called ‘Where Are the War Poets?’

They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, market, 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.

‘Where are the War Poets?’ from Word Over All (1943)

In this short poem, written at the height of the Second World War, Day Lewis takes his cue from a poet who often inspired him and provided his models, W.B.Yeats, who wrote at the height of the First World War I in 1915 ‘On Being Asked For A War Poem’:

I think it better that in times like these
A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

In the event, of course, Yeats was to write a decidedly opinionated war poem in response to the Dublin rising of ‘Easter 1916’ the following year. But a comparison of the two poems I have quoted is instructive. Yeats says the poet is at liberty to confine himself to meddling with girls and old men if he wants; there is no obligation of public statement or involvement.

By contrast, although it is clear throughout his life that Day Lewis would have dearly liked to allow himself such poetic exemption, he never did. It was a constant theme of his that poetry had to dirty its hands, so to speak: ‘pure poetry’ was a tempting ideal, but it was an undeniable moral obligation to take public responsibility seriously. In the brilliantly Yeatsian line that clinches his poem – ‘defend the bad against the worse’ – Day Lewis expresses perfectly how unglamorous involvement in public events is likely to be. It is not, to borrow from Yeats on 1916, ‘a terrible beauty’ but a mundane resistance to ‘the worse’. The answer to the question in the poem’s title is: ‘the war poets are here, obliged to keep their nerve and their principle in the thankless cause of public duty’.

So who exactly was C Day Lewis (he dropped the Cecil and the hyphen from his writing name at the earliest opportunity), this successor of Yeats who took the moral duties of the poet so seriously and of whom T.E.Lawrence said to Winston Churchill in 1934 that he had ‘discovered one great man in these islands. His name is Cecil Day Lewis’? He was born in Ballintubbert, Co Laois 1904, son of Frank Day-Lewis (double-barrelled to register two family backgrounds, Lewis and Day), a Church of Ireland clergyman (as Anglican vicars in Ireland are still somewhat bizarrely called). His father moved to a parish at Malvern,Worcestershire in 1905, so the poet moved ‘From Ireland at the close of my second year’ (‘The Whispering Roots’ - incidentally this fine poem on the stresses of being Anglo-Irish invites comparison with masterpieces of that poetic world such as ‘The Colony’ by John Hewitt. This is high praise, drawing attention to one of the many categories in which Day Lewis has been under-examined - as an Anglo-Irish poet). Day Lewis’s father moved to a parish at Ealing, West London 1908, in the same year that his mother died, when the future poet was four.

Here we find one of several striking coincidences with fellow Thirties poet Louis MacNeice: both were born in Ireland, sons of Anglican clergyman. Both of their mothers died when they were very young; they both attended Sherborne School in Dorset. Each wrote a memoir concentrating on his earlier life. Both, to quote MacNeice’s ‘Autumn Journal’, ‘like[d] being Irish’. And, of course, they are both included in the ‘MacSpaunday Group’ of left-wing Oxford-educated poets associated with the Thirties. In fact , they were more similar than acquainted.

In 1917 Frank Day-Lewis moved to the parish of Edwinstowe, Nottinghamshire. There the hardships and injustices of mining life made an enormous impact on Day Lewis, aged twelve. There is an interesting contrast here with D.H.Lawrence, twenty years his senior: Lawrence, a miner’s son, represents those hardships brilliantly in his short stories but with a cold and dispassionate eye. Day Lewis, an outsider and incomer to them, represents them with fervent sympathy. The contrast can be extended: Lawrence (b.1885), like many major writers in English of his generation, goes Right in politics; Day Lewis (b.1904), like major writers of his, goes Left.

While Day Lewis studied Classics at Wadham College, Oxford, his closest poetic friendship was with W.H.Auden at Christ Church. Day Lewis’s earlier poetry struggled openly, but not very successfully, against the limiting constraints of Georgian verse. His first notable poetic volume was Transitional Poem in 1929. This was a collection of short poems, originally entitled Transitional Poems, in the plural, but changed to the singular in recognition of the Modernist fashion for poetic sequences, as practised by the great masters Eliot and Yeats.

In 1933 The Magnetic Mountain marked a further change of direction: a left-wing, allegorical poem, with the first signs of what has been called ‘industrialized, electrified Utopia’ – a kind of poetry favoured by the left-wing Thirties poets, with distant but distracting connections with Soviet realism.

So when in 1934 Day Lewis produced his first significant prose work, A Hope for Poetry (the source for the second part of my title here), it was written at a time when Day Lewis already had a considerable volume of poetry to his credit, at the age of thirty. His was clearly a voice to be reckoned with. This book was one of most influential and admired works in its own time, published in 1934 and reprinted in 1935, 1936, 1939, 1942, 1944, 1945 and 1947: eight editions in thirteen years.

It is striking too that this book of poetic hope, founded in political principle, was reprinted three times during the war. Like MacNeice’s Modern Poetry, Day Lewis’s account of Auden, Spender and himself makes the case for ‘impure poetry’, descending to the everyday and the public. From the third edition, printed two years after the first, and thereafter, the book had a Postscript which added to this discussion of ‘impure’ poetry a sophisticated and balanced discussion of the limitations of pure poetry, as ‘built on a neurosis’ which was the attempt to justify the pure poet’s ‘disassociation from the community’.

It will be obvious how this connects with ‘Where Are the War Poets?’, the poem I began with. And in its time A Hope for Poetry was immensely popular for a critical book:, even in the period of I.A.Richards, F.R.Leavis, Eliot, early Empson, and MacNeice’s Modern Poetry. If you were asked to name the foremost critical book on poetry in England in 1936, you might very well have named A Hope for Poetry (taking over from, say, Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry), as a work more in touch with what was then being written than anything else.

Why exactly was it seen as so important? A crucial part of the failure to understand Day Lewis and his significance (and I think he has been misunderstood as well as underrated for a long time, familiar as his name has remained) is not taking into account that ‘important little critical book’ (Valentine Cunningham’s admiring phrase for it in 1988 in the course of his discussion of the Thirties poets in his magisterial British Writers of the Thirties). In a word, it is a matter of seeing where hope lay – and for that matter where it lies for writers today. This sounds sentimental; but it represents something quite specific and indispensable in poetic discussion. What I mean by hope, in the context of Day Lewis’s book, is the view that poetry has something distinctive to offer to humanity’s common endeavour and is not, in Yeats’s tempting phrase, merely ‘self-delighting, self-appeasing, self-affrighting’.

The view is summarised towards the end of the Day Lewis’s ‘Postscript’ to A Hope for Poetry as follows: “To the idea of poetry as exclusive, esoteric, a-moral, the private affair of the poet, moving in a different world from prose, creative of its own reality, I should oppose the idea of poetry as catholic, diverse in function, moral, everyone’s business (potentially at any rate), assimilating not rejecting prose meaning, a way of synthesising and communicating reality.’

It is the opposite of the famous, melancholy conclusion that Auden came to in his great elegy for Yeats near the start of World War II:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper.

Day Lewis never reached his friend’s disillusion with the capacity, and for that matter the obligation, of poetry to influence events and the lives of executives. Of course not everything he wrote was political; a late anthology-piece like ‘The Fox’ is just a masterpiece of observation and description, of a kind that was already evident in the best of his early poems. And he had the classicist’s gift for epigrammatic generalistation: ‘And love is proved in the letting go.’ But he remained always ready to treat public subjects, committed throughout his life to the anti-exclusive, outward-looking conception of the writer, just quoted from the Postscript to A Hope for Poetry, and implicit in ‘Where Are the War Poets?’ The major book on Day Lewis’s poetry by his friend Al Gelpi is called Living in Time, taken from Day Lewis’s own observation ‘The poem is an instrument for living in time’: entirely suitable as a summary of a poet who stubbornly remained temporal, denying himself the consolation of any transcendental comfort, beguiling as that always was for someone who was the son of a clergyman.

Auden and Day Lewis in the end divide on the Yeatsian question of whether poetry was free to ignore the public world of its time. They had been engaged in a common enterprise since their student days, an enterprise immortalised in the term MacSpaunday, coined by the hostile, right-wing poet Roy Campbell, but which, like many a negatively intended appellation, can be recharged for use as a positive term. The foursome that the term telescopes is MacNeice, Spender, Auden, Day Lewis respectively: all Oxford-educated left-wing poets who in fact rarely encountered each other and never as a collective: MacNeice was younger and only got to know Auden later. The traditional account of MacSpaunday represents MacNeice as a wary liberal throughout his life – wary indeed because he was a liberal. The other three were all very Left in the Twenties, in the period from the General Strike when they all sided with the workers. Auden was the first to respond again to the pull of ‘pure poetry’ and the primary claims of the personal in the Thirties at a time when Spender and Day Lewis were joining the Communist Party: Day Lewis remained in the Party longest, and was the most active. But, as with all general overviews, the reality of MacSpaunday is more complicated. There is no photograph of all four together; there is only one of the three closer associates (Auden, Day Lewis and Spender). And it is striking that when Day Lewis edited The Mind in Chains (1937), a collection of ringing essays by the Left, none of his fellow-MacSpaunday poets was in it.

The moral for us, I think, is that later failure to see the full significance of the popularity and admiration for A Hope for Poetry, and to understand what Day Lewis meant by ‘hope’ – things which were readily appreciated in his own time - is part of a wider failure in recent English poetry and its discussion. There is a general bias against political writing – often indeed to writing that much concedes at all the existence of a public world of ideas outside the writer’s head – which has prevailed with only occasional questioning since the Modernist period of the 1920s. You have only to think of the disapproving general response to the poems of Tony Harrison about the various Iraq wars over the past decade, or the eagerness to defend Heidegger against Tom Paulin’s unanswerable charge of anti-Semitism in Fivemiletown.

When a major modern poet in English does venture into the public arena in their criticism (I am thinking in particular of Seamus Heaney), they tend to do it through foreign channels. For example, one of the finest discussions of the place of literature within present history is Czeslaw Milosz’s Charles Eliot Norton lectures from Harvard, The Witness of Poetry (1983). The last of his six lectures is, again, called ‘On Hope’. (Day Lewis had also given those lectures in 1964, published as The Lyric Impulse the next year.) It is making a large claim for Day Lewis; but I suggest that one of the reasons that his recuperation is vital is that a fuller understanding of the importance of poetry as a public language can return with him – and perhaps only with the reconsideration of the writers of his time.

As the political poets of the Thirties recognised, theirs was not an easy project. Gelpi concedes that even in the Thirties ‘there was no real proletarian poetry, and it fell to leftist poets like Auden’s group to begin to clear the way for it’: a project founded in hope. There is, as Milosz says, a necessity for hope in our era – as, of course, in any era. Wilfred Owen’s declaration has been much quoted: ‘All a poet can do today is warn’. This is not true for us in our hugely media-informed era where we don’t need warning, being already in grim possession of the facts. What we do need is revitalising in political terms, and to be cautioned against despair. As Milosz argues, there is a crucial role for hope in politics, for an era that has continued to be dominated – very much so in poetry – by a kind of decadent gloom that has prevailed since Nietzsche and Dostoevsky in the late nineteenth century.

For politicians, politics is the art of the possible; but the writer can do a service to politics by reminding it that it must also be the art of the morally desirable, even when that is strategically difficult. And the last time that was recognised in canonical poetry in English (‘canonical’ is an important qualification of course; Michael Horovitz and, for that matter, musicians like Billy Bragg have kept this principle alive) was by Day Lewis and his contemporaries (which include late Yeats who was also their contemporary: late Yeats too is a Thirties poet even if his politics are more distasteful, as is Campbell, the coiner of MacSpaunday). But the overtness of their politics makes the Thirties poets a valuable text for the times, times when, in the much-quoted accusation by Adrian Mitchell, most people will go on ignoring poetry as long as poetry goes on ignoring most people. In his chapter ‘On Hope’, Milosz is uncompromising on this point: ‘the elite is engaged in what is called “culture”, consisting mostly of rituals attended out of snobbery and borne with boredom”.’

The responsibility of poetry for a healthy politics was declared quite expressly in the Thirties in a way that it rarely has been since in English poetry, either in England or America. MacNeice argued for ‘Impure poetry’ – poetry that did not shrink from public involvement - in his early campaigning book Modern Poetry; Day Lewis argued the case again with persuasive conviction, in his critical masterpiece The Colloquial Element in English Poetry in 1947. Note the date: Day Lewis held to the principle long after most of his contemporaries had despaired or wearied of it – although it should be stressed that this too is more complicated than a simple chronology makes it. The Thirties poets always maintained some public presence: Auden appeared on the Parkinson Show in 1970 when he returned to England (as did John Betjeman); we should not need reminding of the generous public involvement in good cultural causes of Stephen Spender throughout his long life.

However, for the most part by now the sad fact is that the case for pure poetry (represented by The Movement and Auberon Waugh’s Literary Review) is the triumphant norm, despite periodic counterblasts such as Al Alvarez’s plea ‘Against the Gentility Principle’ in 1962. Most of the opponents of pure poetry have backed down and/or changed vote. Not that we should overstate the opposition to the Movement poets either of course: many of them were on the political Left, and a declaration of Day Lewis at Hull in 1968 has an air of Movement directness to it: ‘I confess to a predisposition for poems that are about something.’

This then is the ideal framework in which to examine C. Day Lewis, and to praise him. How far did he back down? Fundamentally, not at all in the terms in which he always made the case for poetry, often by contrast with his contemporaries. I want to contest the usual view that his poetry changed dramatically, for better or worse, from the politically committed to the personal: from the impure to the pure. The positive interpretation of such an imputed change – the view that it was a change for the better - was put by Auden who wrote to Day Lewis in 1963 to praise the Selected Poems: ‘I’ve always been meaning to write to you about your Selected Poems, to tell you how delighted I was to find your later poetry so much finer than your earlier. The critics, of course, think our lot stopped writing twenty-five years ago. How silly they are going to look presently.’

The argument here, when it is advanced, is that the later poems were more personal and therefore more universal because less confined to the details of the political moment. But the view attributed here to ‘the critics’ by Auden was the commoner one: that the real virtue of Thirties poets was their political vision, and they lost their distinction by turning their back on it.

Both views are wrong, I think: the first more wrong than the second in my view – personal poetry is not more universal than public poetry, or at least it shouldn’t be thought to be so in principle. If the second were true – if Day Lewis had entirely lost his political vision - it would be a dereliction. But public involvement in various ways remained central to Day Lewis’s writing throughout his life. The causes and issues changed, not the conviction. It is why he is eminently suited to a venerable place in Poets’ Corner.

In contrast with these general accounts, abetted by his own self-judgment (he was almost uniquely, in my experience, graciously ungenerous towards his own work), a reading of his substantial prose criticism in particular shows him to have been remarkably consistent. Yes, he was a member of the Communist Party in the ‘Thirties and later left it. A progression from the Communist Party to Poet Laureateship and tea with the Queen, resting your feet on a corgi (as Day Lewis self-mockingly represents it) does indeed sound like a dramatic move across the spectrum. But any reading of his criticism across his career shows a sustained principle.

We could begin in the middle with his finest essay, the brilliant exploration of poetic diction I’ve already mentioned ‘The Colloquial Element in English Poetry’ (given as the R.S.Watson Memorial Lecture at the University of Newcastle in 1947). It should be the first item on every reading-list for poetic diction, and its generalisations should be better known: ‘the simple and the colloquial are not synonymous’ for example is a neat formula for a principle that became widely held in the following generation. In fact the writer who is most foreshadowed here is Seamus Heaney whose discussions of the creative relations between the spoken language and the formal demands of poetry often parallel Day Lewis’s.

It is worth remarking in connexion with this recalling of Heaney that the reader is constantly being struck reading Day Lewis’s prose by anticipations of more famous statements of the same insight. In his inaugural lecture as Oxford professor ‘The Poet’s Task’ in 1951comes this passage: ‘Poetry is a habit. More and more, that is to say, the person who writes verses will find that he is dependent upon it, not only for pleasure… He is now, for better or worse, committed to poetry as a way of life.’ The reader of Irish poetry cannot fail to be reminded here of Patrick Kavanagh who said you dabble in verses and find it has become your life. But the writer who most comes to mind, particularly in the prose criticism of both writers, is Heaney. For example, Day Lewis’s opposition of ancestored and naïf writers closely mirrors Heaney’s sustained reflections on the influence of earlier writers (such as Yeats), by contrast with ‘sounding’ poets who seem to write by a phonetic impulse. Even more striking is the way that A Hope for Poetry anticipates Heaney’s complex opposition between schooled craft and instinctive technique. I am not suggesting influence here but affinity which in the end may be something more significant anyway.

In turning finally to give a brief account of Day Lewis as poet, I will highlight some of his literary relations and contemporaries, confining attention to his own poetry and what might be called broadly his commentary on poetry. I will not be concerned with his most productive and successful writing, the detective-stories published under the name Nicholas Blake: huge sellers both in Britain and America. I am not dealing either with what tends to be called his ‘serious novels’, autobiographically inspired, of which the first Starting Point is closely linked to his political concerns in the 1930s. I also do not have space to dwell on his role as translator of Virgil; obviously this is relevant to any consideration of the poetry, but happily there is no need of recuperation here. Everyone recognises his Virgil translations as a major success – especially The Georgics (1940) and The Eclogues (currently being translated by the Irish poet-editor Peter Fallon who has declared Day Lewis’s English hexameters to be a formidable precedent).

There is a striking passage in Day Lewis’s short but brilliant reflection ‘On Translating Poetry’ (University of Exeter 1969: the Jackson Knight Memorial Lecture) when he collocates the lacrimae rerum passage in the Aeneid in his own and Dryden’s versions. The two passages are a wonderfully succinct illustration of the contrast between the classical couplets (what in The Colloquial Element he calls the ‘royal language’ for poetry) of Dryden’s celebrated translation, and the vernacular style his own hexameters lean towards - a diction for poetry that is close to the spoken language. Naturally he draws no conclusions; but I think the Day Lewis version does not suffer in the comparison, once the different objectives in poetic diction are grasped.

I want to end this discussion of Day Lewis’s centenary as an occasion for hope by turning to the poetry which I believe, especially in his middle period from about 1935 to 1945, triumphantly vindicates the cultural arguments in which it is founded. The collected poems are available in Jill Balcon’s edition which she will use as the basis of a Selected Poems to be published by Enitharmon later this year. As will already be clear from what I have been saying, I think the next pressing necessity is a volume of the criticism. I believe the publication of this would restore Day Lewis to his rightful position side by side with MacNeice and Auden: a volume to stand on the shelves beside Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand or the celebrated Oxford volumes of MacNeice’s prose.

So what about the poetry? Whatever the case for the prose, for its consistency and imagination, his primary significance is that he was the Poet Laureate of whom I said at the start that he was a prominent figure in the poetry of every decade from the Twenties to the Seventies. His Collected Poems runs to nearly 750 pages. Famously he said to Philip Larkin (the familiar generosity-cum-modesty again) ‘you write too little and I write too much.’ I don’t think he did, in a writing lifetime that extends for nearly fifty years.

But how do we set about restoring Day Lewis’s poetry into the popular canon? Part of the resistance to Day Lewis, and to other Thirties writers, has to do with the current resistance to public subjects, as I have said. As far as that goes, they can wait for the fashion to change. There can rarely have been an era in which political opinion was so strongly expressed and political action, in poetry or anywhere else, so little engaged in as ours in English. There is another factor: it has proved strikingly different for World War II poets, by contrast with those of World War I to catch on. For forty years people have been trying to give the same centrality to Alun Lewis and Keith Douglas accorded to Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg, but it has never quite worked. Day Lewis, as well as a Thirties poet, is also a World War II poet. Some of his best poems were written during that war when he was in the Home Guard and the Ministry of Information. The poems that he himself liked best, like ‘O Dreams! O Destinations!’ retain their power:

Travellers, we’re fabric of the road we go,
We settle but like feathers on time’s flow!

And the poem called ‘A Failure’ is a great masterpiece, as good as Auden in evoking writer’s block as well as personal and political frustration through its horticultural metaphor:

Some galloping blight

From earth’s metabolism must have sprung
  To ruin all;
Or perhaps his own high hopes had made
  The wizened look tall.

But it’s useless to argue the why and wherefore.
When a crop is so thin,
There’s nothing to do but to set the teeth
And plough it in.

Day Lewis’s varying line lengths has a music all of its own: he was a wonderful singer and reader of poetry, gifted supremely with what modern criticism – especially of Irish poetry – calls ‘voice’.

So why does Day Lewis remain less discussed than MacNeice? Characteristically he said
himself it was because MacNeice was a better poet (indeed, before he really knew
MacNeice, he said in the 1930s that MacNeice’s first volume of poems was the most
significant MacSpaunday product). The current view, in 2004, is that MacNeice was the
finer poet – no disgrace of course, since MacNeice stocks are extremely high nowadays.
But it is worth recalling that it is not that long since MacNeice too needed – and received - recuperation. Irish poets in the Seventies and Eighties competed for the rights to that task.

It is interesting to note, in this context, that Day Lewis has been pretty consistently included in anthologies of Irish poetry: he had five poems in the canon-forming 1958 Oxford Book of Irish Verse by Donagh McDonagh and Lennox Robinson for instance, and his Yeatsian poem on Con Markiewicz is included in Brendan Kennelly’s Penguin Book of Irish Verse. He has remained a consistent presence in British anthologies too: Michael Roberts, of course, the editor of New Signatures (1932), the small anthology that launched the Thirties poets as a group, included him in his hugely influential Faber Book of Modern Verse, and he was kept in it by Anne Ridler who revised it in 1960. (There is a fascinating mutual influence of the ‘ploughing in’ image at the end of ‘A Failure’ with the end of Roberts’s introduction to New Signatures.) As an indication Day Lewis has nine poems there: the same as Auden and Spender; MacNeice has five and Dylan Thomas four. For that matter, Yeats included eight Day Lewis poems – eight, it has to be said, of his most Yeatsian early pieces – in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936.

Philip Larkin includes Day Lewis poems in his 1973 Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. They end with ‘My Mother’s Sister’, Day Lewis’s beautiful tribute written towards the end of his life to his aunt Knos (the aunt who brought him up after the death of his mother: another striking coincidence with Heaney whose wonderful poem ‘Sunlight’ at the start of North in 1974 similarly celebrates his child-minding aunt. For that matter MacNeice and Michael Longley also celebrate such an Anticleia figure). Larkin also includes ‘Sheepdog Trials in Hyde Park’, dedicated to Robert Frost, a poem whose scrupulous attention to the canine and ovine minutiae of the event might make us forget that this too is a celebration of a public occasion.

In accounting for the neglect of Day Lewis there is another, even more accidental factor.
He died at sixty-eight so he could hardly be called long-lived; but, by contrast with
MacNeice, who died when he was fifty-six, he lived long enough to be encrusted with the
honours to which a reaction invariably sets in. It is a great irony that Day Lewis, who
championed democratic political causes and made the case so eloquently for the
colloquial in poetry, should become celebrated and award-ridden in the poetry
establishment, without in the process becoming very popular as a poet. There are many
reasons to believe with Auden that his hour will come again, even if ‘the critics’ do not
yet quite look silly for believing that ‘our lot’ stopped writing in the thirties. Poems like
‘The Nabara’, celebrating Basque resistance in the Spanish Civil War, have a power and,
I would suggest, relevance to our times which have not been recognized. But that too is a
victim of the aesthetic fashions of an age which is resistant to the long poem.

Day Lewis must be credited too for holding to a liberal ideological centre: for not moving
dramatically across the spectrum as many 1930s leftists did. Put in those terms it doesn’t
sound exciting; but it is right. And finally all his endeavours can be gathered together
under the heading of social action, from his address to an Adult Education Body at New
College, Oxford in 1936, to his writing of socially rooted poems in the Sixties and even willingness to fulfil the public duties of the Poet Laureate, praising Teesside as well as commemorating the investiture of the Prince of Wales. Though like the rest of us he was subject to fits of gloom and uncertainty about his own achievements and capacities, he never lost hope in the common endeavour. He was entirely free of cynicism and incapable of being patronising: virtues that can he felt in everything he wrote. As to whether an age will come when such values will be prized again, as an Act of Hope I am confident that they will. But for certain I can only follow the lead of Jill Balcon at the end of her introduction to the Collected Poems by quoting the poet himself in the words that appear on his grave:

Shall I be gone long?
 For ever and a day.
To whom there belong?
Ask the stone to say,
Ask my song.

Bernard O’Donoghue is a Fellow in English at Wadham College and an award-winning poet.