Cecil Day-Lewis Quotes

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

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

Now the peak of summer's past, the sky is overcast And the love we swore would last for an age seems deceit.

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.

Love is proved in the letting go.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

High sprits they had: gravity they flouted.

Flying alone! Nothing gives such a sense of mastery over time over mechanism, mastery indeed over space, time, and life itself, as this.

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