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Keith Douglas
1920-1944
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Keith Castellain Douglas is buried in the
Tilly-sur-Seulles War Cemetery at Calvados in France, Europe.
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Grave of Keith Douglas
(Photograph by Romain Bréget)
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He was educated at Christ's Hospital and at Merton
College Oxford where his tutor was Edmund Blunden.
His childhood was marred by his mother's illness, by the
separation of his parents and by financial worries which
threatened to curtail his schooling.
His poetry began
to appear in periodicals in the 1930s but he only had one
volume published in his life time which was Selected
Poems (1943).
He signed up for WW II and after
Sandhurst gained a commission in the Second Derbyshire
Yeomanry and was posted to the Middle East in 1941 where he
later took part in the second battle of EL Alamein as a
camouflage officer. His descriptions of wartime Cairo
and the desert landscape were particularly powerful and his
Alamein to Zem Zem was published after his death in
1946. While serving in the war he developed his poetic style
using spare, energetic language and tried to capture the
exterior of things with a technique he described as
'extrospective'.
He was killed in Normandy by enemy
mortar fire while advancing on Bayeux - following the D Day
Landing; he was 24 years old.
Ted Hughes was a big fan of his work and provided the
introduction for his posthumous selection which appeared in
1964.
A Complete Poems appeared in 1979 -
edited by Desmond Graham who also wrote a biography of
Douglas.
Douglas is now primarily remembered as a War
Poet - one of the smaller number of WWII poets.
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As a white stone draws down the fish
she on the seafloor of the afternoon draws down men's
glances and their cruel wish for love. Her red lip on the
spoon
slips in a morsel of ice-cream. Her hands
white as a shell, are submarine fronds sinking with
spread fingers, lean along the table, carmined at the
ends.
(from Behaviour of Fish in an Egyptian
Tea-Garden)
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