Cecil Day Lewis has two contrasting claims on our attention. The first is as an archetypal poet of the 1930s, the first-born, last-named member of the Auden-Spender-Day Lewis triad, and the only one of those three friends whose commitment to Marxism extended to joining and working for the Communist party. His second claim to recognition, at least for literary historians, is as the Poet Laureate of England from 1968 until his death in 1972. For critics and biographers, he poses the intriguing problem of reconciling the radical poet of the 1930s with the traditional poet of later decades.

The most obvious answer to the seeming paradox of Day Lewis's career is that his native poetic temperament was always romantic, even Georgian, and that the ideological overtones of his work in the 1930s were even then at war with a talent more at home with nature poetry and personal lyrics. But...