Love Is in the Letting Go

Who reads C. Day Lewis now? The reputations of W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, with whom his work was closely associated in the 1930s, have steadily grown, while even Stephen Spender, the fourth and least interesting member of that odd quartet, is accorded more consideration.

Yet the finest of Day Lewis's poetry repays attention, even if you have to wade through a lot of turgid early stuff to get to it. Unlike Auden and MacNeice, he had no gift for the grand gesture, the world-view, and when he tried it, the result was a woolly leftism that's as faded as the covers of those 1930s anthologies you'll sometimes come across in secondhand bookshops.

A thinker he wasn't, yet his best poems, notable for their formal and lyrical grace, are affectingly thoughtful. These came after he had abandoned that curiously tepid brand of communism to which certain comfortably-off English writers were attracted in the decade before Stalin showed the world what was what.

Born in Ballintubbert, Co Laois, the only child of a Church of Ireland clergyman who moved the family to England when Cecil was an infant, he was educated in Oxford, where he studied classics, met Auden and, through him, the other "MacSpaunday" poets (the dismissive title, invented by Roy Campbell, combined all four names).

In a long and varied career, he worked as a schoolteacher, editor (at the Ministry of Information), publishers' reader and broadcaster. Professor of Poetry in Oxford in the 1950s, he was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968 and remained so until his death in 1972.

His personal life was messy, though good for the poetry - he wrote awfully well - without any of the overt soul-baring that confessionalism would later make the norm - of the pain and pleasure of sexual passion and of the conflicting pulls of parental love and domestic stability.

Chief among his love affairs was a decade-long liaison with novelist Rosamond Lehmann, which eventually ended his first marriage but didn't survive it. He finally found contentment with the actress Jill Balcon, whom he married in 1951 and who contributed an absorbing introduction to The Complete Poems, published by Sinclair-Stevenson in 1992.

Was he an Irish poet? Irredentist nationalists would say no, though he himself insisted on his Irishness, and there are many fine poems about Ireland in his later volumes. Their tone is that of a civilised observer, loving a country and its people, but not quite of them. Does that make him somehow not Irish? If so, we'd better boycott a lot of other writers as well.

Albert Gelpi, who is Professor of American Literature at Stanford University, makes heavy weather of poetry that should be allowed to speak for itself and that certainly doesn't require the tortuous, line-by-line explications to which it's subjected here.

This is a pity, because he is both informative and interesting on the poet's life and career. In this he had the help and encouragement of Jill Balcon, and one senses an opportunity missed - he should have opted to write a proper fulllength biography, which no one has yet done.

However, his book has the virtue of sending the reader back to the poems. Here are the last two stanzas of "Walking Away", in which he watches his eldest son Sean "go drifting away/Behind a scatter of boys" after a game of football:

That hesitant figure, eddying away

Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,

Has something I never quite grasp to convey

About nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorching

Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so

Gnaws at my mind still.

Perhaps it is roughly

Saying what God alone could perfectly show -

How selfhood begins with a walking away,

And love is proved in the letting go.

That's how good this undeservedly neglected poet could be.

John Boland is a poet and critic, and an Irish Times columnist