The last notice of C. Day Lewis's verse to appear in these pages was a review of The Whispering Roots in 1970 [see CLC, Vol. 6]…. It was not so much a review, I thought, as a literary mugging.

Now that Day Lewis is no longer a living laureate, but simply a dead poet, perhaps the time has come to consider his work more temperately, to forgive him the great gifts that he did not have (and never claimed), and to value what he had, and what he achieved…. [He] was of Hardy's company, a decent minor poet in the same tradition.

If even Day Lewis's most friendly critics have not always seen him clearly in that tradition, they have had reasons for confusion. For one thing, he found his poetic place relatively late, after much searching and much imitating, and his earlier books are full of echoes of other...