SOURCE: "The Development of Day Lewis," in Auden and After: The Liberation of Poetry, 1930-1941, George Routledge & Sons Ltd., 1942, pp. 1-9.

In the following essay, originally published in 1941, scholar and critic Scarfe looks at different stages in Day Lewis's verse to assess his progress as a poet, finding a "deep integrity and a firm attachment to the best human aspirations."

Like Auden, Day Lewis is a deceptive poet, with a great deal of irrelevance in his work, but beneath it some solid virtues. He has sometimes been described as a Georgian gone wrong, and it is certain that in spirit he does not quite belong to the Auden group with which he has been associated. But he is a Georgian with a difference, a Georgian who has read Eliot, Hopkins and Marx—and that means a great deal.

Lewis has been a slow developer as a poet, and...