Together with Auden, Spender and MacNeice, C. Day Lewis was one of the leading young poets who in the 1930s broke away from the poetic establishment of those days. Day Lewis started writing poetry very young and, despite an active career which embraced schoolmastering , journalism, publishing, academic lecturing and the writing of detective stories, his devotion to poetry never wavered. Always prolife, he continued to write to the end of his days, so that when he died in 1972, having held the Chair of Poetry at Oxford from 1951 and 1956 and having been appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, he left behind a very large and varied body of work.

Here, for the first time, are all the poems Day Lewis wrote, including the vers d'occasion which have never previously appeared in book form and a number of works which have only been published in a limited edition before now.