‘The soldier who is going to die’

Until Faber and Faber published a selection of his poems in 1964, twenty years after his death, and then a Collected Poems two years later, Keith Douglas had been largely forgotten. Since that time, however, he has been widely anthologized and acclaimed: ‘the one British poet of the Second World Was who can bear comparison with those of the First’, as Michael Hamburger suggested in 1968.1 It is a reputation based on a handful of remarkable poems completed near the end of his short life, but nonetheless a reputation that seems to have settled: he is for many critics the abiding poet of the Second World War.

Keith Castellain Douglas was born in 1920 in Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent – quintessential middle England. He spent much of his early upbringing in the leafy village of Cranleigh, Surrey, and at six was sent to a prep school in Guildford, ten miles away. Douglas's father – also Keith – had been a military man of distinction in the Great War, and remained distant and aloof, but his son loved and admired him deeply, even ‘emulating’ him by playing at being a soldier in the garden and standing sentinel by the front door. However, by the time Douglas was eight his father had vanished from the household, not to be seen again. This must have had a profound effect on little Keith, of course, but his father's influence would be lasting: at eleven, he progressed to Christ 's Hospital School, Sussex, where he would go on to join the school's Officer Training Corps (OTC) and become almost fanatical about drill. When he went up to Oxford, to read English, his extra-curricular interests remained military as well as literary: one minute he was with the mounted section of the OTC, which he joined at the first opportunity, and the next he was editing the university magazine Cherwell.

Douglas, then, was ready and willing when the inevitable war came, on 3rd September 1939. Within three days he had reported for duty, only to be told that because of his age he would not yet be called up. He was an intense young man, insecure, affectionate and pugnacious in turn; his two relationships at university both ended in his being left by young women who adored him but ultimately found him overbearing.