Overlooked since his death 40 years ago, Anglo-Irish poet Cecil Day-Lewis deserves greater popularity, Oxford University was told yesterday.
In life, he was self-deprecatory. In death, the world took his natural modesty too seriously, putting him in a lower tier behind his poetic contemporaries of the 1930s.
Yesterday, however, Wadham College in Oxford marked perhaps the renaissance of Cecil Day-Lewis, who was born in 1904 in Ballintubbert, Stradbally, Queen’s County, now Co Laois.
The day’s celebration of Day-Lewis’s life was sparked by the donation of 54 boxes of his papers, manuscripts and letters by his son, the actor Daniel, and film documentary-maker daughter Tamasin.
“This is a long-awaited celebration of the of the life of Cecil Day-Lewis,” said Sarah Thomas, who will have custody of his artistically significant papers in the Bodleian Library.
Praising his work, Cork-born Prof Bernard O’Donoghue, now emeritus fellow in English at Wadham, said he had been “misunderstood and underrated for a long time”.
Along with WH Auden, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice, Day-Lewis held strong communist sympathies during the 1930s, only to turn away following Stalin’s purges in 1938.
