Stefan Collini writes:

Of the four, it was Day-Lewis who came closest to fulfilling the ancient bardic role of recording in verse the major collective experiences of his tribe. This may, in turn, have contributed to his having suffered the most dramatic decline in poetic reputation among the quartet (Spender runs him close here); the fact that no full-scale biography of him had been attempted in the three decades following his death in 1972 also meant he was less likely than his contemporaries to be seen in his full complexity and thereby reassessed. Peter Stanford, prompted and supported by Day-Lewis’s widow, the actress Jill Balcon, has now undertaken the work of recovery, and he makes clear that he believes this biography should provide the occasion for a major reassessment of his subject’s standing as a poet.

(LRB 6 September 2007)

Continuum | hardback 368 pp. |ISBN: 9780826486035