Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis said he was “thrilled” to give papers belonging to his late father – the poet Cecil Day-Lewis – to the Bodleian Libraries.
His family has presented the archive, which fills 54 boxes and includes letters from contemporaries including WH Auden, Sir John Gielgud and Sir Alec Guinness and early drafts of his own work, to the libraries, which are part of Oxford University.
Day-Lewis, who also wrote crime fiction as Nicholas Blake, studied at the university and became poetry professor there in 1951 before being appointed poet laureate in 1968.
His children, Daniel and Tamasin Day-Lewis, said: “We are thrilled that our father’s manuscripts are going to be housed at the Bodleian and certain that he would have been honoured and pleased that they had been accepted.
“Oxford played an important part in our father’s life. If the manuscripts had ended up outside the country it would have saddened us all as a family as the poets who became papa’s lifelong friends and peers all met up at Oxford as undergraduates.”