Cecil Day-Lewis Quotes

• Cecil Day-Lewis / Poet

Love is proved in the letting go.

• Cecil Day-Lewis / Poet

High sprits they had: gravity they flouted.

• Cecil Day-Lewis / Poet

A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.

• Cecil Day-Lewis / Poet

Selfhood begins with a walking away, And love is proved in letting go.

• Cecil Day-Lewis / Poet

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

• Cecil Day-Lewis / Poet

There's a kind of release And a kind of torment in every goodbye for every man.

• Cecil Day-Lewis / Poet

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 / Poet

The poetic myths are dead; and the poetic image, which is the myth of the individual, reigns in their stead.

• Cecil Day-Lewis / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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 / Poet

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.