Art & Creativity Quote by C. Day Lewis

The line is a quiet refusal of the popular myth that poems are just polished containers for pre-made wisdom. C. Day Lewis frames writing not as transcription but as discovery: the desk is a laboratory, not a lectern. The opening "First" signals a methodological statement, almost like a craft manual, and then he delivers the inversion that gives the quote its bite: clarity is the enemy of composition. If the thought is already solved, verse becomes mere packaging.

Subtextually, Lewis is defending poetry against two pressures that dogged his generation. One was the demand for public usefulness - the 1930s expectation that a poet should arrive with a message, preferably political, and deliver it cleanly. The other was the modern suspicion that poetry is ornamental, a way to beautify what prose could say more efficiently. Lewis rejects both by insisting that the incentive to write comes from not knowing yet. The poem earns its existence by thinking in a way ordinary statement cannot.

Context matters: as an Auden-group contemporary who later became Poet Laureate, Lewis lived through a period when poets were asked to be citizens, prophets, and entertainers at once. This line offers a third identity: the poet as someone willing to stay inside confusion long enough to shape it. It also hints at an ethic of honesty. Writing from pre-existing certainty can slide into propaganda or performance; writing from uncertainty keeps the poem porous to surprise, contradiction, and the felt texture of experience. The desk, for Lewis, is where the mind stops pretending it has already arrived.