Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Before he published his translation of Virgil's Aeneid in 1952, Cecil Day Lewis saw out the 1930s with a version of the Georgics. It was published in 1940, in the early days of the Second World War, a poem of retreat written in a besieged Britain. In the ‘Dedicatory Stanzas’ (to Stephen Spender) which preface his version, Day Lewis confronts Shelley's declaration of the part that the poet plays in history and asks the question of one of his own most famous lyrics, ‘where are the war poets?’it gives us the humpTo think that we're the unacknowledged rumpOf a long parliament of legislators.Where are the war poets? The fools inquire.We were the prophets of a changeable morningWho hoped for much but saw the clouds forewarning:We were at war, while they still played with fireAnd rigged the market for the ruin of man:Spain was a death to us, Munich a mourning.No wonder then if, like the pelican,We have turned inward for our iron ration,Tapping the vein and sole reserve of passion,Drawing from poetry's capital what we can.Day Lewis, like many Irish and English writers of the 1930s, ended that decade with little hope for the legislative influence of the Shelleyan poet and turned deliberately ‘inward’. The global market is now pursuing takeover and merger by violent means, so, ‘Drawing from poetry's capital what we can’, poets must tune the martial resonance of political poetry down to aesthetic ... log in or subscribe to read full text