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After a hilarious period in command of Musbury's Home Guard platoon Day-Lewis went to London in spring 1941 to become an editor in the Ministry of Information's publications division

Lewis, Cecil Day- [pseud. Nicholas Blake] (1904–1972), poet and novelist, was born on 27 April 1904 at Ballintubbert, Queen's county, Ireland, the only child of Frank Cecil Day-Lewis (1877–1937), Church of Ireland curate, and his wife, Kathleen Blake Squires (1878–1908), daughter of William Alfred Squires, civil servant. His mother died when he was four and he was brought up in London by his father and his selfless aunt Agnes Olive (Knos) Squires. Educated at Wilkie's preparatory school, London, and Sherborne School, he entered Wadham College, Oxford, in 1923 with a classics exhibition. He began writing verse as a schoolboy and, sure of his poetic vocation, he chose mainly literary friends and acquaintances at Oxford. During his third year there he met the undergraduate W. H. Auden, the major influence on his early work. Their collaboration continued through 1927–8 when Day-Lewis held a teaching post at Summer Fields preparatory school in Oxford. Together they edited Oxford Poetry, 1927. Day-Lewis obtained a second class in classical honour moderations in 1925 and a third in literae humaniores in 1927.

After his two early slim volumes of verse, more or less ‘Georgian’ in style, Beechen Vigil (1925) and Country Comets (1928), Day-Lewis (who dropped the hyphen from his surname for publication) became more rigorous with Transitional Poem (1929). This sequence was the first public manifestation of what was later to become known as the Auden gang or, as their unsympathetic contemporary Roy Campbell satirically put it, the MacSpaunday (Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis) beast.

Day-Lewis had married on 27 December 1928, when he took his second teaching post at Larchfield School, Helensburgh, near Glasgow. His wife was (Constance) Mary (1902–1975), daughter of one of his former Sherborne form-masters, Henry Robinson King. Two years later he moved to Cheltenham junior school in Gloucestershire. By 1934 he had two sons as well as a wife to support, and it was primarily to make money that he began to write detective novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake. His A Question of Proof (1935) was set at a preparatory school which featured aspects of those at which he had taught. It proved to be the first of twenty Blake novels mostly featuring the detective Nigel Strangeways, and its success was a factor in encouraging him to retire from teaching to become a full-time writer and political activist in December 1935. He joined the Communist Party three months later, and there followed two intense years when he wrote three straight novels, two detective novels, weekly book reviews, and many polemical pamphlets and essays. He was in demand as a speaker and lecturer and in organizing the tiny Gloucestershire branch of the party. By early 1938 he had decided he must make a choice between ‘being an amateurish political worker or trying to make myself a better poet’. Poetry won.

In order to break with political and public life, Day-Lewis moved with his family to a secluded thatched cottage on an upper slope of Castle Hill above Musbury, a straggling east Devon village, in August 1938. It was a move crucial to his poetic development.

After a hilarious period in command of Musbury's Home Guard platoon Day-Lewis went to London in spring 1941 to become an editor in the Ministry of Information's publications division. In 1946, soon after his release from the ministry, he became senior reader for the publishers Chatto and Windus, an association that lasted until the end of his life. Increasingly through this decade there was a conflict between the private Devon poet nourished by the countryside and the public London literary figure, the conscientious committee man.

This conflict was echoed in Day-Lewis's emotional life. In 1939–41 he took part in a volcanic love affair with the wife of a neighbouring Musbury farmer, dwelt upon in several poems and the final somewhat autobiographical Nicholas Blake story The Private Wound (1968). They had a son. From 1941 he began a more complete relationship with the novelist Rosamond Nina Lehmann, commuting for the rest of the decade between her and his family at Musbury. She inspired some good poems, she broadened his personality, and she encouraged him to travel abroad and to take on such tasks as the Clark lectures at Cambridge in 1946. Such a divided life was a great strain on all concerned. At the end of 1949 he fell in love again, this time with the 24-year-old actress Jill Angela Henriette Balcon (b. 1925), daughter of Sir Michael Balcon (1896–1977), film producer. The following year he left both Mary and Rosamond for a second marriage with Jill, which took place on 27 April 1951 after the dissolution of his first marriage. They had a daughter and a son (the Oscar-winning film actor Daniel Day-Lewis).

His health declined after 1969 and he died of cancer on 22 May 1972 at Lemmons, Hadley Wood, Hertfordshire, the home of the novelists Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis. Appropriately he was buried at Stinsford in Dorset only a few feet from Hardy's grave, and less than 30 miles from the Devon border country where he found his voice.

-- adapted from Sean Day-Lewis, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography