Complete Poems

C. Day Lewis was born in Ireland ( and always cherished his Irish background) in 1904, and was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford. On leaving Oxford in 1927 he taught at various schools in England and Scotland until 1935, when he abandoned schoolmastering for good. By then he had published half a dozen volumes of verse, of which From Feathers to Iron and The Magnetic Mountain formed the basis of his reputation as one of the significant poets of the thirties. In 1946 he was invited to give the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and from 1951-6 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Two years later he became Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature. He was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard in 1964-5 and held the Compton Lectureship in Poetry at Hull University. During all this time he continued steadily to write poetry. In 1968 he was appointed Poet Laureate, but tragically died of cancer only four years later.