Grevel Lindop, Stand Magazine, Volume 6 2006:

The front cover of this book reproduces watercolour sketches by Keith Douglas of two tanks, one of which has the word 'Amorist' painted on its khaki side in large white capitals. This is appropriate, for the letters which survive from Douglas's shockingly short life (he was born in 1920 and died in 1944 during the Normandy landings) are concerned more with painting than with poetry, and more with love than either.

Desmond Graham, whose 1974 biography is the definitive work on Douglas, has collected in this volume all of the poet's known letters. They confirm that Douglas was an unlikely character to become the best-known poet of the Second World War. 'As a child,' he wrote in a thinly veiled autobiographical fragment, 'he was a militarist.' Athletic, impatient and cantankerous, never self-consciously intellectual, he seems for much of the time preoccupied mainly with borrowing good horses to ride, and with chasing girls. When he mentions his art at all, it is usually his painting, in which he took great pride, decorating his rooms at Merton College, Oxford, with huge oil paintings, adorning his Palestinian billet with a mural of stylised ballet dancers, and enclosing drawings with many of his letters - more, indeed, than contain poems. Nor was he a notably diligent student; anyone who has taught in a university will recognise only too well the wheedling, strategic tone of the letters addressed to his tutor, Edmund Blunden, when bursaries are due for renewal and the requisite essays have not been handed in.

Money is a constant theme. Douglas's father had abandoned Keith and his mother in 1928, and thereafter they never had a secure home or income. Holidays from school and university are spent with friends or relatives, and Douglas is continually looking for odd jobs as riding instructor, Greek or English tutor, and even portrait painter, from anyone he can interest.

The principal appeal of his pre-army letters is their resemblance to an intricate epistolary novel chronicling the avid, torturous and self-conscious love life of a gifted student under the shadow of military service. In his poems Douglas was a vivid celebrator of women. No one can forget the opening lines of 'Cairo Jag'-

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; she dances
By apparent levitation? Or Marcelle, Parisienne,
Always preoccupied with her dull dead lover...

even if they don't know that 'cutting a piece of cake' was army slang for having sex with a prostitute. And early in his Introduction Desmond Graham quotes a less famous poem, 'To Kristin Yingcheng, Olga, Milena':

Women of four countries,
The four phials full of essences
Of green England, legendary China,
Cold Europe, Arabic Spain, a finer
Four poisons for the subtle senses
Than any in medieval inventories.

As these passages show, Douglas could damn women as eloquently as he could praise them (and often in the same words). The letters show him, at Oxford and in the army, as not only an avid pursuer of love and sex but also manipulative and at times dishonest. He writes to Toni (Antoinette) Beckett, a fellow Oxford undergraduate,

I... want you to be my mistress, if only you can feel right about it. Because the relation of lovers is something quite as good as marriage and quite different... I want so very much, painfully, that you should love me so entirely as to be proud to give yourself and to put yourself for me, in a position in which you could lose everything.

Around the same time he is writer to his former mistress Betty Sze (the 'Yingcheng' of the poem),

I think you have a fair chance of as much happiness as I can get now with Toni. But you, however cheaply you behave,... will always be the only person I love completely - you'll become almost a goddess or a mania if you go away... If you ever can decide that things could be all right... please have the courage and confidence in me to come back.

The twists and turns of Douglas's love life are fascinating, and his avid pursuit of the female rendered understandable, if excuse were needed, by the fact that, starting his university course in the autumn of 1939, he expected to be called up at any moment and probably killed. But how much his love letters tell us about his poems? A similar question might be asked about his letters from the war. Awareness of censorship prevents his going into detail about the follies of his superiors or the practicalities of commanding a tank. Naturally enough most of the letters home describe periods of leave in Cairo, Tel Aviv and other cities, and when we do get a glimpse of the battlefield it is related not to poetry but to painting, as in a letter to Tambimuttu, editor of Poetry London, written in January 1944 after the Battle of El Alamein, discussing plans for a volume of poems, essays and drawings:

...as pictures, they give an accurate idea of the appearance of things, with one exception. In the case of the man burning to death I have had to retain all the features, to give the chap some expression, although of course they're expressionless, as their faces swell up like pumpkins.

One sees, perhaps, why Douglas tends not to dwell on his battle experience in the letters; though a vivid idea of tank warfare is given in his incomparable prose narrative, Alamein to Zem Zem, posthumously published and based on a diary kept at the time. But it also seems often that when poems do appear in a letter, they are there - logically enough - to describe what cannot be as effectively said in prose. The poem is a continuation of the letter but is not self-consciously reflected on.

This will seem surprising to those who expect a poet's letters to be full of discussions of poetry. But the truth is, probably, that most poets write letters about their own poetics only when talking to their editors, or in reply to attacks on their work. Occasionally, too, they may pick an argument with a fellow poet. Douglas rarely does this, and is notable for having kept clear of fellow bards even as a student, a time of life when most poets clique-forming is irresistible. Later, his most memorable remark about a fellow-writer comes in a vignette of literary company in Cairo:

I see a good deal of various poets whose names may have reached you - Bernard Spencer, Terence Tiller Robin Fedden and occasionally Larry Durrell. In the opposite camp lie (and lie and lie) John Waller whose face is folding up on him and that dirty, inky little wretch G.S. Fraser who looks anything but New Apocalyptic. I think he grows watercress in his ears, which are always full of rich Nile mud.

Is it editorial compassion or mere accident that has resulted in Fraser's name, alone of all the company, being absent from the index to this book?

In hindsight it may seem significant that Douglas had Edmund Blunden as his tutor at Oxford, and was a close friend of Hamo Sassoon, nephew of Siegfried. Attempts to trace any sort of poetic lineage, however, fail utterly. Douglas shows no sign of discussing poetry with Hamo; and although on cordial terms with Blunden, and suing him regularly, after joining the army, as a channel to get poems to editors in England, he generally refers to him in terms of mild exasperation as one living in an unworldly donnish haze. Typical remarks to third parties include (from Palestine in 1942), 'Blunden... doesn't seem to be conscious of the existence of airgraphs or the possibility of sending a postcard by airmail' and (from Cairo a year later):

Nothing from Blunden for months. It incenses me that he should have his room stacked with review copies of books which he doesn't want, by the hundred, and here we are starved for books, and it never occurs to him to send any.

Douglas's brief but important 1943 essay 'Poets in This war', given by Graham as an Appendix, omits Blunden altogether from its brief retrospect of First World War poets.

Douglas's letters show him, then, as an 'unpoetic' poet. They communicate parts of his experience vividly, but leave us to conjecture just how experience found its way into words. There is no clue to the distinctive features of his poems - the irregular but satisfying rhythms, the clashing mixtures of abstract and concrete nouns, the sliding and ambiguous syntax, the though which moves into abrupt, tangential observations and surreal juxtapositions, and - above all - the characteristic stanza of five or six lines ending in half-rhymes, often arranged palindromically (ABCCBA).

Nonetheless, as the volume continues, poetry gradually comes over the horizon, slowly converging with the other topics of the letters. This is mainly because in his last year Douglas is negotiating with Tambimuttu for a volume to be published by Poetry London. Even them much of the discussion centres on matters of selection, order and presentation. The most substantial discussion of his poetics comes in a letter of 10th August 1943 to John Hall:

You say I fail as a poet, when you mean I fail as a lyricist. Only someone who is out of touch, by which I mean first hand touch, with what has happened outside England... could make that criticism. I am surprised you should expect me to produce musical verse. A lyric form and a lyric approach will do even less good than a journalese approach to the subjects we have to discuss now. I don't know if you have come across the word Bullshit... it symbolizes what I think must be got rid of - the ivory towers, etc., that stands between us and our problems and what we have to do about them.

This is Douglas the harsh realist speaking but one wonders, as so often when looking at these letters, where there isn't a touch of self-conscious bluster about the riposte, and perhaps also some attempts to recreate the tone of Owen's famous Preface: 'This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fir to speak of them... All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.'

The letter to Hall is often quoted, partly because its rhetoric lends itself to quotation and partly because there is so little else that directly expresses Douglas's poetics. Ore revealing, perhaps, is the biographical note Douglas provided, from a Palestine military hospital in October 1941, for a volume of Selected Poems by himself, Hall and Norman Nicholson.

I am interested [he wrote] in clothes, drawing and painting (my own and other people's), horses,... music, ballet, stage design. Recreations, tap-dancing, rugger, water-polo, competitive swimming. That should be more than enough.

The letters unselfconsciously corroborate most of this. At Oxford Douglas took courses in drawing alongside his English degree; early letters show him advising his female friends authoritatively on how they should dress and even sketching fashion designs for them. Letters to his mother show him enquiring, with an eye to his post-war career, about courses in 'Costume design, Décor and Interior decoration.'

The notion of Keith Douglas as conturier may seem hard to swallow, but it was apparently conceivable; and it is not difficult to imagine that had he survive we might now think of him chiefly as a painter - a transitional figure, perhaps , between the generations of John Piper and Graham Sutherland (seventeen years his seniors) and David Hockney (seventeen years his junior), and an exact contemporary of Patrick Heron. The clue to his peculiar poetics may well lie in his painter's eye, which noted colour, pattern, movement and juxtaposition, and to which a person's clothes - their personal style - spoke of their identity. In 'The Marvel', one of his greatest poems, it is the lens from the eye of a 'great tropic swordfish' through which the wonders of the deep pass, and which is used at last to focus the rays of the sun, burning the name of a woman onto a piece of a wood. For Douglas looking came before saying.