Book description
In this work, C. Day Lewis, former Professor of Poetry at Oxford,
chooses a form that enables his various gifts to be displayed to
advantage and to sustain rapt interest in a poem longer than convention
now favours.
It is a poem in seven parts: 'Dialogue at the Airport'; 'Flight to
Italy'; 'A Letter from Rome'; 'Bus to Florence'; 'Florence: Works of
Art'; 'Elegy Before Death: at Settignano'; 'The Homeward Prospect'. The
whole resembles a suite in music; various metres are used, and each part
is self-contained, though all are on the same subject - a journey to and
in Italy. The poet has used his first impressions of the country to
illustrate certain deeper themes indicated by the epigraph: '... an
Italian visit is a voyage of discovery, not only of scenes and cities,
but also of the latent faculties of the traveller's heart and mind.'
If anybody has had the slightest doubt about Mr. Day Lewis's ability to
practice what he professes so eloquently and vigorously in his lectures,
An Italian Visit should be convincing proof that its author is a poet in
the full and splendid exercise of his powers.' Eric Gillett in the
National Review. Cecil Day-Lewis CBE (27 April 1904 - 22 May 1972) was
a British poet from Ireland and the Poet Laureate from 1968 until his
death in 1972. He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of
Nicholas Blake. He is the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis and
documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.
Day-Lewis was born in Ballintubbert, County Laois, Ireland. He was the
son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis and Kathleen Squires. After
Day-Lewis s mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his
father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with
relatives in Wexford. Day-Lewis continued to regard himself as
Anglo-Irish for the remainder of his life, though after the declaration
of the Republic of Ireland in 1948 he chose British rather than Irish
citizenship, on the grounds that 1940 had taught him where his deepest
roots lay. He was educated at Sherborne School and at Wadham College,
Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927.
