Works
Lay's early prints show some debt to the manner of Aubrey Beardsley, but during the 1920s and 1930s he developed a distinctively deco manner, producing a considerable series of oils depicting family groups or pairs of characteristic Suffolk vernacular types in a pseudo-naive style and in vibrant colour. In his watercolours, landscapes are populated in less formal, more relaxed ways.
Lay's volumes of poems appeared mainly between 1927 and 1934. They are mainly collections of short lyrics in new Elizabethan manner, sometimes erotic, and, although rural and showing a countryman's sensibilities, without sentimentalism or any strong note of nostalgia. Cecil Lay married Joan Chadburn, daughter of the painter Haworth Chadburn, in 1932. 'His origins, training and experience seem as if designed to produce that complex of rootedness and spiritual uprootedness that so often gives the artist's special oblique angle of view.' National Press opinions of his early verse comment on his Elizabethan frankness, simplicity, admirable lyrical impulse combined with tigerish intensity and focus, wit, beauty and blunt realism. His romantic sensibility was blended or moderated with classic restraint.
He was a friend of the Sieveking family and, although a project (by Martin Secker) to publish his collected poems had foundered in 1937, the broadcaster Lance Sieveking in 1962 published a Collected Poems of Cecil Lay with his own Introduction, and an extended quotation from an earlier Introduction intended for the original Secker volume of 1937, written by A. E. Coppard. Not only Coppard, but also Middleton Murry, Desmond MacCarthy and W. H. Davies had been attracted to Lay's poetry, and Lance Sieveking emphasised the ways in which the poems resembled those of W. H. Davies.
Read more about this topic: Cecil Howard Lay
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet; that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials; that goes rusty, and educates the boy; that sells the horse, but builds the school; works early and late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again.”
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“I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each of these works an act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken; that act or step is the spiritual act; all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousand times.”
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