News at Eleven: A Hope for Poetry, published three-quarters

of a century ago, had an extraordinary impact. Day Lewis's assertion that poets (and, in particular, himself and his colleagues WH Auden, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice) had a prominent role to play in articulating the pressing challenges of economic recession and rising unemployment ran to six editions in the years up to the second world war, three more before 1945 and was still being reprinted in the mid-1970s. A few months after it came out, the Evening Standard reported on a meeting between TE Lawrence and Winston Churchill. They were bemoaning the state of Britain when Lawrence remarked that he had been reading a book by "the one great man in these lands - his name is Cecil Day Lewis".

Today it seems extraordinary that so much hope could be invested in poetry.

from The Guardian: Sacred indignation

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