IMPACT OF WAR ON A POET

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33775, 22 February 1975, Page 10

IMPACT OF WAR ON A POET

Keith Douglas: 1920 1944. By Desmond Graham. Oxford University Press. 295 pp. N.I. price $12.95. Keith Douglas, whose volume of posthumously-collected poems first appeared in 1951, was perhaps the most gifted English poet to die in the Second World War, though ironically, it was war which brought hs talent to its brief maturity. From early childhood Douglas had been fascinated by war, but his feelings about it had always been ambivalent. On the one hand he was repelled by its mindless brutality; while at the same time its romantic aura was an irresistible attraction. No doubt it was visions of glory no less than the fear of missing out on experience which prompted him to join the cavalry in 1940. Certainly he greatly enjoyed aquiring the art of graceful equestrian deportment and learning how to cut and thrust with a drawn sword; but by the time he arrived at Sandhurst to complete his cadet training, the mounted units had become an anachronism. Transferred to a mechanised unit he discovered that the study of the internal combustion engine did not suit his romantic temperament nearly so well as horsemanship. A deeper source ot irritation was his relationship with his senior officers in the Second Derbyshire Yeomanry, the regiment to which he was posted on leaving Sandhurst. Unlike Douglas, whose background was solidly middleclass, his fellow-officers were for the most part country gentlemen of the "hunting, fishing and shooting” variety, and they tended to impose their social distinctions on the regiment. His situation deteriorated .still further in Egypt, where he found himself attached to the even more exclusive Sherwood Rangers. His main consolation was that he would soon be seeing some action: but for a while it seemed that even this was going to be denied him.

Eventually, after a series of misadventures and frustrating delays, Douglas contrived to transfer himself from the position of a truck driver for divisional headquarters to the command of a Crusader tank at the front. There he aquitted himself so well that no action was taken against him when his escapade was discovered. It was the beginning of his participation in the Western Desert campaign, which, later, during another period of enforced inactivity, he was to describe so vividly in his prose narrative, “Alamein to Zemzem”. Despite his enthusiasm for action, Douglas was by no means a reliable soldier. He was impulsive and rebellious, and in indulging his penchant for “hosing around” on the battlefield, he sometimes led his tank crew into unnecessary trouble. But his bravery and resourcefulness under fire were never in question. If his frequent periods of inactivity were a vexation to him, they did

provide him with the leisure to write poetry. And he was writing now with impressive maturity, about his experience of war. His work differs from that of the Great War poets, in that its purpose is to explore and understand rather than to protest. The impact of war had transformed' the lyrical impulse of his earliei poetry to one of ironic detachment, Poems like “Vergissmeinnicht” and “How to Kill”, are far removed in tone from the poetry he had been writing at Oxford, which he now accepted as an expression of pre-war innocence. “My object,” he wrote to a friend in 1944, “is to write true things, significant things in words each of which works for its place in a line. . . I see no reason to be either musical or sonorous about things at present. When I do, I shall be so again, and glad to.” Lyricism was to emerge once more in the last poem he wrote before his death in Normandy in 1944, the elegiac “On a Return From Egypt”: