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Living in Time - The Poetry of C. Day Lewis (Hardcover)
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Living in Time - The Poetry of C. Day Lewis (Hardcover)
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The Oxford poets of the 1930s--W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Stephen
Spender, and Louis MacNeice--represented the first concerted
British challenge to the domination of twentieth-century poetry by
the innovations of American modernists such as Ezra Pound and
William Carlos Williams. Known for their radical politics and
aesthetic conservatism, the "Auden Generation" has come to loom
large in our map of twentieth century literary history. Yet Auden's
voluble domination of the group in its brief period of association,
and Auden's sway with critics ever since, has made it difficult to
hear the others on their own terms and in their own distinct
voices.
Here, rendered in eloquent prose by one of our most distinguished
critics of modern poetry, is the first full-length study of the
poetry of C. Day Lewis, a book that introduces the reader to a
profoundly revealing and beautifully wrought record of his poetry
against the cultural and literary ferment of this century. Albert
Gelpi explores in three expansive sections the major periods of the
poet's development, beginning with the emergence of Day Lewis in
the thirties as the most radical of the Oxford poets. An artist who
sought through poetry a way of "living in time" without traditional
religious assurances, Day Lewis went further than his friends in
seeking to forge a revolutionary poetry out of his commitment to
Marxism. When Stalinism led to his resignation from the Communist
Party, Day Lewis in the forties went on to shape a rich, fiercely
perceptive poetry out of the convergence of the wartime crisis with
the explosive events of his own inner life, intensified by the
erotics of a decade-long affair. Returning to his Irish roots and
meditating on the persistent tension between agnosticism and faith
in the work of his third and final period, Day Lewis wrote some of
the most moving poems in the language about mortality and dying,
the limits and possibilities of human striving.
Through the traumatic changes of his life C. Day Lewis came
increasingly to depend on the intricacies of poetry itself as a way
of living in time. His abiding belief in the psychological and
moral functions of poetry impelled him in his critical writings and
in his own poetic practice to delineate a modern poetics that
presents an effective alternative to the elitist experimentation
associated with Modernism. This vital revisionist reading of Day
Lewis demonstrates that much of his best work was written after the
thirties and establishes him as one of the most significant and
accomplished British poets of the modern period.
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