The Poetic Image: The Clark Lectures 1946 - Cecil Day-Lewis

Published by Jonathan Cape Ltd, London, 1955, hardcover, 158 pages, condition; as new.

A important and original contribution to the literature of interpretative criticism -contains the Clark Lectures delivered at Cambridge University in 1946. The theme is poetic imagery, not only in its stricter sense of simile, metaphor and image, but in the wider application of the term, by which every good poem is itself a total image made up of a multiplicity of component images. It is therefore more than an academic study of one aspect of poetic material and technique: it is an investigation into the nature of poetry itself, taking as its clue the belief, as old as Aristotle, that the power of image-making is the one sure sign of poetic genius. Beneath all the manifestations of the poetic image, Mr. Day Lewis traces one principle at work - the ' abiding impulse in every human being to seek order and harmony behind the manifold and the changing'.

Cecil Day Lewis (1904 1972), often written as C. Day-Lewis, was an Anglo-Irish poet and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 until his death in 1972. He was the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, and documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.