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Title: The Complete Poems (Oxford Poets) by Keith Castellain Douglas, Desmond Graham, Ted Hughes ISBN: 0-19-288087-X Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (3 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: The James Dean or Kurt Cobain of War Poets
Comment: Keith Douglas wrote a poetry boasting an incantatory and muscular lyricism that few others of his generation matched. He could carry off sentimental themes effectively because he used language that never blinked or swooned. Yet his tough,verbal carapaces sheltered a heart that bled to see "how easy it is to make a ghost". He was just beginning to find his own voice when he was killed in 1944. What were his influences? His poetry contain traces of T S Eliot's whimsical modernist tone in "The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock": "Shall I get drunk or cut myself a piece of cake/a pasty Syrian with a few words of English/or the Turk who says she is a princess" ("Cairo Jag".) Or Douglas recalled William Blake and his conversational apocalypticism, when "he looks at the sea/and does not smell its animal smell/Does not suspect the heaven or hell/in the mind of a passerby" ("Egytpian sentry). Or even WH Auden's opinionated rhythms: "I praise a snakeskin or a stone: a bald head or a public speech I hate" ("Snakeskin and Stone". Occasionally, Douglas conjured Matthew Arnold of "Dover Beach" fame, where "Everywhere is a real of artificial race/of life, a struggle of everyone to be/master or mistress of some hour." ("Egyptian sentry"). But perhaps his most characteristic influence was John Donne and the conceits of the Metaphysical poets: "Can I explain this to you? Your eyes/are entrances the mouths of caves - I issue from wonderful interiors/upon a blessed sea and a fine day/from inside these caves I look and dream". The telegrammatic sharpness and urgency of his language remained taut throughout his short writing life. Even as a precocious fourteen year old, he wrote with a disciplined terseness: "The small men walk about antlike/and the bell tolls. God created these/beautiful and angular, not different", when many others of his age might be experimenting with the verbal luxuriance of Keats or liquid verbosity of Shakespeare. However, the key to the poetry of this very unEnglish poet, who was more Latin with his impulsive temperament, is contained in several loving translations of Arthur Rimbaud, which gives us a clue as to how the twentysomething tank commander perceived himself and his poetry. Translating Rimbaud, a tortured young French symbolist poet who gave up writing at 20, Douglas premonitions his own death from shellfire shrapnel in "Le Dormeur du Val", where "A young soldier with bare head and mouth open/and his neck immersed in the fresh blue flowers/is sleeping stretched out in grass under heaven/pale in his green bed where the light showers". The sentimentalisation of a hero's death and the Romantic liebestode is at odds with his saner observation elsewhere: "How can I live among this gentle/obsolsecent breed of heroes, and not weep?" (Aristocrats), suggesting a fundamental tension in his personality and work, between cool sobriety and dramatic passion, which remained unresolved, perhaps because he failed to find personal reconcilation in what he called the "rose of love" ("I experiment"). Ultimately, Douglas demands not to be judged by his immature outbursts, or sentimental dreaminess, but by his tough yet humane response to what "the others never set eyes on". He implores us in "Tel Aviv": "Do not laugh because I have made a poem;/it is to use what then we could not handle/words too dangerous then, knowing their explosive/or incendiary tendencies when we are so close-/if i had said this to you then, BANG will/have gone our walls of indifference in flame."

Rating: 4
Summary: "Promising" is the word
Comment: Keith Douglas was the greatest English poet of the Second World War, which admittedly isn't saying a hell of a lot, as there were few others who even came close. It was that kind of war. But Douglas was already precociously talented when he joined a cavalry regiment (the Sherwood Yeomanry) and wangled himself a post commanding a light tank in the Western Desert.

The war made Douglas as a poet, and also killed him. He seems always to have had a premonition of early death; one of his most haunting poems is the much-anthologised "Simplify Me When I'm Dead". The title makes the point. He survived some bitter fighting in Africa, and was killed, bizarrely enough, by a mortar shell in Normandy, which left no trace on his body.

Douglas' best poems, which frankly number around half a dozen, introduce a new note into English poetry that wouldn't be picked up until Sylvia Plath had a crack at it more than fifteen years later. His mature tone is almost but not quite conversational, laconic, hardly bothering to rhyme, and yet eerily compressed and kaleidoscopic. His is truly a poetry that strings a tightrope above an abyss. Poems like "Adams", the aforementioned "Simplify Me When I'm Dead", "How To Kill" and the persistently unfinishable "Bete Noire" pack a charge that very few poets since have matched. His last poem, "On A Return From Egypt", seems to be a genuine premonition of his own death.

While Douglas only barely managed to write enough really good poems to be considered a major poet - which he is - it's hard not to think that, on the one hand, it's a tragedy that he didn't live longer and write more, and on the other hand that his entire work seems almost to have been planned to culminate in his death (he died at 24, a lot younger than Rimbaud.)

Douglas at his worst is mannered and romantic, but his best work is the flipside of that - terse, no-nonsense, energetic and deeply worrying. He is missed, even if the curve of his development makes future work almost inconceivable.

Rating: 4
Summary: Imagine John Donne mixed with TS Eliot
Comment: His poetry exhibits a muscular lyricism. (If you want to understand where Douglas is coming from,you can do better than to read my review. Ted Hughes has written a considered introduction to the selected poems of this WWII poet.)

Two poems stand out in Douglas' ouevre. "How to Kill" and "Vergissemeinicht" The first is a taut meditation on the act of killing, from the point of view of a sniper viewing a soldier in his "dial of glass...who is going to die" and "moves about in ways his mother knows". The form of the poem is unusual with an 'imploding ' abccba rhyming scheme. "Vergissemeinicht" is German for Forget-me-not. The poem takes its title from a message found scrawled on a girl's photo in a dead German tankman's Panzer, that "is good and hard, when he is decayed." Don't think Douglas is all war poetry or pure pacifist gore. He just happened to write his best stuff during the war, including a semi-biographical novel before he was killed in 1944 aged 24. A gifted prodigy with a forceful temperament, some of his love poems from his Oxford days, display a tenderness and sensitivity that veers into dramatic exclamations, conveying the rich, complex character of the poet. His remarkable gift for evocative language and his obsessive personality is captured in lines written while training in Egypt: "I listen to the desert wind, that will not blow her from my mind". There are times when Douglas' emotional immaturity mars what is otherwise a significant achievement for someone so young. He lapses occasionally into self-indulgent verse that inhibits his essential big-heartedness for both love and life. In Douglas' poetry, love and life are in fact used interchangeably. This is perhaps fitting for a poet at war, who did not permit his intellect or sensibility to be brutalised by the encompassing violence. As a tankman, Douglas' war was itself hermetically sealed in a way, until he was caught by a sliver of shrapnel so fine, no! wound was apparent. Characteristically, that final moment was prophetically recorded in one of his last poems which is included in this collection.