C. Day Lewis Quotes
BiographyAuthor Profession: Actress
Nationality: American
Born: December 31, 1958
No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?
C. Day Lewis
However, Claim, Earth,
Summer has filled her veins with light and her heart is washed with noon.
C. Day Lewis
Light, Heart, Love,
First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.
C. Day Lewis
Clear, Mind, Down,
We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
C. Day Lewis
Write, Order, Understand,
Selfhood begins with a walking away, And love is proved in letting go.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Love, Letting Go, Walking Away
We who fly do so for the love of flying. We are alive in the air with this miracle that lies in our hands and beneath our feet.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Lying, Feet, Air
A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born … in poetry.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Way, Using Words, Born
A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Poet, Figures, Should
There’s a kind of release And a kind of torment in every goodbye for every man.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Goodbye, Farewell, Men
To travel like a bird, lightly to view | Deserts where stone gods founder in the sand, | Ocean embraced in a white sleep with land; | To escape time, always to start anew… | Hooded by a dark sense of destination… | Travelers, we’re fabric of the road we go; We settle, but like feathers on time’s flow.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Ocean, Sleep, Dark
It is unwise to equate scientific activity with what we call reason, poetic activity with what we call imagination. Without the imaginative leap from facts to generalisation, no theoretic discovery in science is made. The poet, on the other hand, must not imagine but reason–that is to say, he must exercise a great deal of consciously directed thought in the selection and rejection of his data: there is a technical logic, a poetic reasoning in his choice of the words, rhythms and images by which a poem’s coherence is achieved.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Exercise, Science, Discovery
Flying alone! Nothing gives such a sense of mastery over time over mechanism, mastery indeed over space, time, and life itself, as this.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Space, Giving, Flying
Now the peak of summer’s past, the sky is overcast And the love we swore would last for an age seems deceit.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Summer, Lying, Past
High sprits they had: gravity they flouted.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Aviation, Flight, Gravity
They who in folly or mere greed Enslaved religion, markets, laws, Borrow our language now and bid Us to speak up in freedom’s cause.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Law, Poetry, Greed
The poetic myths are dead; and the poetic image, which is the myth of the individual, reigns in their stead.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Art, Poetry, Reign
