Cecil Day-Lewis CBE (27 April 1904 – 22 May 1972) was an Irish poet and the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 until his death in 1972. He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake. He is the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis and documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.
Day-Lewis was born in Ballintubbert, Stradbally, County Laois (formerly known as Queen’s County), Ireland. He was the son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis (died 29 July 1937) and Kathleen (née Squires; died 1906). After the death of his mother in 1906, Cecil Day-Lewis was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with relatives in County Wexford. He continued to regard himself as Anglo-Irish for the remainder of his life, though after the declaration of the Republic of Ireland in 1948 he chose British rather than Irish citizenship, on the grounds that 1940 had taught him where his deepest roots lay. He was educated at Sherborne School and at Wadham College, Oxford. In Oxford, Day-Lewis became part of the circle gathered around W. H. Auden and helped him to edit Oxford Poetry 1927. His first collection of poems, Beechen Vigil, appeared in 1925.
Photograph: Irving Penn, 1951.
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