BiographyRoy Campbell famously described the group of middle class, university-educated poets associated with WH Auden as "Macspaunday". His distaste for their seemingly unassailable grip on the 1930s literary scene was renowned, writes Gerald Dawe
While Auden emerged victoriously out of the decade and the controversies of his moving to America as the second World War was declared, the fate of Mac (Louis MacNeice), Sp (Stephen Spender) and Day (Cecil Day-Lewis) was much less clear.
Spender survived the war, and the 1950s, to become a highly regarded critic and chronicler of his generation, very much involved in the intellectual and ideological battles of post-war Britain and its relations with war ravaged Europe and triumphant America, though his poetry drifted from critical view.
MacNeice pursued - if that word fits - a "career", as an academic and subsequently as a radio producer for the BBC in London, and, as this year's centenary celebrations at Queen's University Belfast have shown, he survived being forever tagged as the other senior partner in the Auden Generation game. Indeed MacNeice emerges as one of the greatest English language poets of the mid 20th century: a remarkably adept, subtle, engaged imagination that withstood the pressures and frailties of his time, and, perhaps, more importantly, his own personal demons.
The wondrous Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (edited by Peter Mac Donald), which was published earlier this year by Faber, is clear evidence of a poet sticking to his guns, come what may - a lesson in itself for these celebrity media-obsessed times.
The reputation of the fourth rider of the apocalypse, Cecil Day-Lewis, has suffered the most, and in this new (there only has been one other) biography, we have the chance to wonder why, by revisiting Day-Lewis's life work as a poet.
PETER STANFORD, IT needs to be said, has done a great job in assembling the various strands of autobiography that fed Day-Lewis's poetic imagination. The early loss at the age of four of his mother, the unpredictable, loving yet domineering presence of his Reverend father, the "Anglo-Irish" background - an obviously key influence on Day-Lewis's sense of self, as all embracing as it was in regard to his friend, Elizabeth Bowen - though he was "not quite two when his parents left Ballintubbert and Ireland forever, . . . ever after he always defined himself, when asked, as Irish" - and a passionate nature, which led him into several complicated and complicating love affairs as a twice-married man, were the makings of both man and poet.
The generational pull of politics and the belief that poetry had to be constantly brought before the public's attention, particularly in the increasingly disinterested 1950s and early 1960s, brought with it other civic responsibilities: sitting on numerous arts, library and cultural relations committees, as well as the role of English poet laureate. It all reveals a man who, while appearing to be an obvious and very public part of the literary establishment, was actually a man of very deep and unresolved contradictions.
UNDER THE NOM-DE-PLUME Nicholas Blake, Day-Lewis wrote a series of successful detective novels, including the intensely autobiographical, The Private Wound (1968) - a film script, if ever there was one - set in his beloved west of Ireland, where he and his family spent many summers in Louisburgh, Co Mayo.
His performances, on stage, radio and, towards the end of his life, on television, with his revered second wife, the distinguished actor Jill Balcon, point to his fervent belief in poetry as a dramatic and popular art. Shy and often introspective, he sang Tom Moore melodies when given half a chance. Like MacNeice he lived through the London Blitz but made light of his own contribution to the Home Front war effort; and through his communist activities in the 1930s, he had been monitored by MI5.
As Stanford's moving account of this goodly man moves towards his final months, terminally ill, living in the home of Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis, nursed by his wife, and visited by his dear friends, such as Auden, the biographer reports an exchange with Jill. It's January 1972: "judged too ill to travel to the BBC Television Centre in west London . . . crew and performers gathered in the Day-Lewises' sitting room - along with emergency generators because a miners' strike was threatening power cuts. One evening after filming, when the lights had gone off again, Balcon was making a fire in the study. As he sat watching her, he remarked, as if recalling his youth, 'I'm always on the side of the miners'". On the strength of this detailed account of his life, it seems that Day-Lewis was on the side of the angels. And for that he, like his poetry, should be praised.
John Betjeman's "verdict" was certainly clear: "I am absolutely sure his poetry was underrated. He persists in the mind. I just rattle on the ears". In revisiting the different houses in which Day-Lewis lived, Stanford remarks that the poet "had a great capacity to respond to new places and new landscapes . . . but he never truly settled, physically or emotionally, however much part of him yearned for it. Each paradise was always, as he admitted, lost, often through his own actions. One side of him remained forever the traveller of his poems" - an insight amply dramatised by this important and necessary study.
Gerald Dawe has published six collections of poetry and has recently published My Mother-City & Bit Parts: Two Essays. He teaches at Trinity College Dublin
C Day-Lewis: A Life by Peter Stanford Continuum, 368pp. £25