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The forgotten battlefield poet whose verse ‘spat out shrapnel’
Three days after the D-day landings in June 1944, Capt Keith Douglas’s armoured unit was stranded on high ground overlooking Tilly-sur-Suelles in Normandy. Leaving his tank to carry out a reconnaisance, he was killed by German mortar fire. He was 24.
Douglas is known mainly, but not widely, as a war poet, although most of his poetry was written before going to war. His descriptions of wartime Cairo and desert fighting, and his contemplations of death, reveal what was a fast-maturing energy accompanied by an unadorned diction.
He joined the military when the Second World War began, cutting short his education at Oxford where he was editor of the student newspaper Cherwell, although he wasn’t called for training until the summer of 1940.
The following year he was posted to the Middle East as a tank commander in the Allies’ campaign against Rommel. Douglas wrote some of his most acclaimed poetry at this time and his vivid memoir, Alamein to Zem Zem, illustrated with his own drawings, was published after his death.
Now, on the centenary of Douglas’s birth, we have a new biography, Simplify Me: the…
