An excellent introduction to Keith Douglas in the L.A. Review of Books

Steven L. Isenberg published an excellent piece on Keith Douglas in the L.A. Review of Books the other day (see here). His article provides an introduction to Douglas for American readers and does a great job of meshing biography, prose snippets and extracts from poems, all in a limited word count. Keith Douglas' work isn't widely known on the other side of the pond, but Isenberg's feature contributes to rectifying that anomaly and bringing his verse to the attention of a transatlantic readership.

Clarissa Aykroyd's The Stone and the Star blog

Another year, another excellent poetry blog comes to my attention...

... this time it's Clarissa Aykroyd's The Stone and the Star. Her blog is especially interesting because it often draws on out-of-copyright poems that can thus be republished and discussed in situ. Moreover, Aykroyd doesn't just slap verse up there and deal with it superficially. Instead, she gets her hands dirty and homes in on how the verse functions.

Perhaps my favourite out of all the recent posts on The Stone and th Star is Aykroyd's detailed analysis of Keith Douglas' "Words". Okay, so I'm a committed Douglas fan, but she really does the poem justice. Furthermore, her piece encourages me to reread his verse in the light of her remarks.What greater recommendation can I give...?!

Minor poems, major effects

Many of my favourite poets are associated with certain renowned poems, pieces that bear their hallmarks and are thus invariably chosen for anthologies. However, I find that often one or two of their so-called minor works stick most in my mind.

One such example is Keith Douglas and a little-mentioned poem, Canoe. For all its defects, Canoe entrances me from the start ...

""Well, I am thinking this may be my last
summer, but cannot lose even a part
of pleasure in the old-fashioned art of
idleness...

...through to its ending, precariously balanced, somehow pulling off a success, as if Douglas were indulging in poetic excess in the context of war,as if he were writing an elegy for himself...

"...when this boat

travels with you alone towards Iffley:
as you lie looking up for thunder again,
this cool touch does not betoken rain;
it is my spirit that kisses your mouth lightly."

Canoe captivated me when I first read it at the age of eighteen, and I've carried it with me ever since. It might be a minor poem in the context of the body of Douglas'work, but it's had a major effect on me.

The Overdrive Moment

When writing poetry, I carry certain snippets with me, sparks that I aspire to creating. Many have been with me for years. Chief among them is one from Ted Hughes in his excellent introduction to to my battered OUP edition of Keith Douglas' Complete Poems (still one of my favourite books fifteen years later).

Hughes compares Keith Douglas to Elizabeth Bishop, highlighting several shared qualities such as the "subjective accompaniment to an...objective outlook", before homing in on a key difference:

"Comparing the two, it is surprising to find that...she knew nothing of that overdrive moment in Douglas, that effect of sudden foreshortening, the abrupt impatient short-cut where his seriousness opens and he arrives at the core of his inspiration..."

I still remember my first reading of that statement, a clear and consise explanation of what I relished most about Douglas' poetry and wanted to capture for myself. Even now, it's always at the forefront of my mind as I open my notebook.

Erudition as a tool

Keith Douglas was one of the first poets to captivate me – his music was intoxicating for this teenage reader, while I also connected with the concrete imagination that he filtered through his wartime experiences.

Even now, I can’t resist playing the same game once more – speculating as to how his work and life might have evolved if he’d survived. As they develop, many poets step further and further back from life in order to understand it from fresh perspectives; for reasons mentioned above, Douglas took the opposite route.

I’m convinced that Douglas is a major poet, that his overall reputation is still hindered by the tag of “war poet”. The afore-mentioned astutely concrete imagination seems unique to me among his contemporaries. Not shying from his erudition, he learnt to use it as a tool, not a badge.

Back to the initial question - would the breadth of his poetic ambition have turned him into an exile from post-war Britain or would it have found young Movement poets and ignited something special…?

I do still love this game!