SOURCE: "Stephen Spender—Cecil Day Lewis—Louis MacNiece," in The Price of an Eye, William Morrow and Company, 1961, pp. 99-110.

Here, English scholar and accomplished poet Blackburn maintains that the principal theme in Day Lewis's poetry is the intense significance—despite its mutability—of human life.

Although he has an unfortunate tendency to write really appalling, keepsake verses for public occasions such as Royal Birthdays—this seems a kind of nervous tick—Cecil Day Lewis (b. 1904) is usually an honest poet. He does not versify ideas or luxuriate in images for their own sake, since his gift seems dovetailed to his personal experience and he uses it to serve certain conceptions which are his poetic life.

To understand this truthfulness of Day Lewis one must take his work as a whole. The principal theme which runs through it is that of duality, the opposition between life and death...