Literary history has come to consider Day Lewis almost exclusively in terms of his association with Auden and Spender, as a member of the so-called Auden Group. And while the group image, as we shall see, overstates the actual homogeneity of the three poets and detracts from the individual talent of each (in particular, Auden's), the tendency to associate Day Lewis with a collective point of view and an impersonal poetry reveals a crucial truth about his work. From the "Auden Group" to the Poet Laureateship, Day Lewis has sought in poetry to realize the self, or to discover a self, through self-effacement. His political and his personal poetry alike are of a piece, in that each begins with the vision of the disintegration of the self as mirrored in the disintegration of society. At the heart of Day Lewis' poetry is the search for a new society...