Ah, not in dreams, but when our souls engage
With the common mesh and moil, we come of age.
He wrote her a despairing letter: ‘I begin really to hate romantic love, to feel it should be bracketed with gunpowder as man’s most disastrous invention.’ The result of this view was disaster all round, confusion, pain, not least to himself.
We now know that Marxism, the Soviet Union, the God that Failed, was for these new pastors no real pastorate. The band of writing comrades stayed friends and drifted elsewhere. (Later, Spender was shocked to see a crucifix on Auden’s mantelpiece in New York.) For Day-Lewis there was the Oxford Professorship of Poetry, then he was made Poet Laureate. In 1952 his MI5 file was closed; ‘he had not come to notice in recent years’. The need to serve, to be socially active, admirably persisted. He devoted great energy to the propagation of poetry itself, in lectures, in helpful books like The Poetic Image, not for its propaganda value but for its humanising effect, its contribution to human solidarity.
This book does not descend to mere gossip, succeeds in making the reader like Day-Lewis and catches his charm. Much more importantly it helps the reader to sympathise with and understand his poetry: romantic, yes — also dismissive, tortured, and sometimes joyous. Try his 1943 Word Over All collection, in his Collected Poems. I am not sure about romantic love as dangerous as gunpowder. The Chinese invented it, his friend Louis MacNeice pointed out, in order to make fireworks.
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