"Poet, translator of classical texts, novelist, detective writer (under the pen-name Nicholas Blake), performer and, at that time, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, C Day-Lewis had many careers all at once. This first authorized biography tells the private story behind the many headlines that this handsome Anglo-Irish Poet Laureate generated in his lifetime." "Day-Lewis made his name as one of the 'poets of the 1930s', launching a communist-influenced poetic revolution alongside W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender that aspired to spark wholesale political change to face down fascism." "In the 1940s, 'Red Cecil', as he had become known, broke with communism, and with Auden. He went on to produce some of his most popular and enduring verse, reflecting both on the course of the Second World War and on the breakdown of his first marriage." "Day-Lewis was always pulled between a fulfilling domestic life and a restless desire to explore. His travels, his infidelities and his reflections on his Irish roots are all part of the rich and many-faceted life that Peter Stanford describes. It is, however, as a poet that he is best remembered, and the poetry itself, often autobiographical, forms an integral part of this biography."--Jacket.