An Italian Visit by Cecil Day Lewis - 2013-03-02

paperback. Good. Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items. May be an ex-library book.

London: Jonathan Cape, 1953. 1st. hardback. Near fine, missing d/j, blue boards, blue spine titling on cream; text block firm, pages crisp and unmarked. Provenance: inscribed on ffep by Christopher Fry, the English poet and playwright who died in 2005). 8vo: crown (200 x 140 / 8"" x 5_""). C. Day Lewis, former Professor of Poetry at Oxford, chooses a form that enables his various gifts to be displayed to advantage and to sustain rapt interest in a poem longer than convention now favours. It is a poem in seven parts: 'Dialogue at the Airport'; 'Flight to Italy'; 'A Letter from Rome'; 'Bus to Florence'; 'Florence: Works of Art'; 'Elegy Before Death: at Settignano'; 'The Homeward Prospect'. The whole resembles a suite in music; various metres are used, and each part is self-contained, though all are on the same subject - a journey to and in Italy. The poet has used his first impressions of the country to illustrate certain deeper themes indicated by the epigraph: '... an Italian visit is a voyage of… Read More