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Anthony Head, ‘Depleted Fury’: The Poetry of Keith Douglas, Essays in Criticism, Volume 74, Issue 3, July 2024, Pages 379–400, https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgae020
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THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE NORMANDY LANDINGS was marked in June, with the low-key ceremonies that typify the passing of the years. Among the many thousands who died in the ravaging of northern France was the poet Keith Douglas (1920-44), killed by a mortar blast three days after D-Day. His stature today is owed largely to the work of Desmond Graham, whose Keith Douglas 1920-1944: A Biography (1974) was followed by his editions of The Complete Poems of Keith Douglas (1978), Douglas’s war memoir Alamein to Zem Zem (1979), A Prose Miscellany: Keith Douglas (1985), and The Letters of Keith Douglas (2000).1 Several reissues of these works, along with occasional critical studies, such as William Scammell’s Keith Douglas: A Study (1988), and reviews in literary journals, have ensured that Douglas remains accessible, if not exactly at the forefront of public perception. Both his critics and admirers still often try to ‘place’ Douglas within a broader literary context than the limiting ‘War Poet’ category: a review on 18 August 2020 in the Irish Times of a more recent biography by Richard Burton, Simplify Me: the Life of Keith Douglas, was titled ‘Less a war poet, more the last great Romantic’; and there is little doubt that in some ways he has suffered at the hands of the War Poet industry. Although he loved uniform and ceremonial, and as an undergraduate at Oxford would leave his spurs and riding crop in view to impress visitors to his room, Douglas was seemingly lacking in conventional patriotism. In his first editorial for The Cherwell in 1940, he attacked those who believed they were fighting a ‘race of submen’;2 and Graham relates the anecdote of Douglas’s ejection from a cinema when he had leapt onto his seat and hurled expletives at the audience for cheering newsreel of a German plane being shot down. He took no significant active or intellectual interest in politics, and patriotism, as a source of either pride or disillusion, is not present in his work.
