Not long before his cruelly early death, Douglas matched the grim reality of war with a lyric passion
Fusing the 'cynic and the lyric' … Keith Douglas. Photograph: The Brotherton Collection
Seventy years ago, the poet Keith Douglas was killed during the Allied invasion of Normandy on 9 June, three days after D-Day. He was 24.
Douglas had shown a talent for poetry since childhood – as well as a passion for all things military. At Oxford, where he was taught for a time by Edmund Blunden, he already knew his task as a poet: it was to fuse the "cynic and lyric" aspects of his nature to form "a balanced style". If he admired the first world war poets, he was determined not to follow their path with protests and pity. Such writing, as he said, would have been "tautological".
While serving in the north African campaign Douglas was wounded by a mine. This week's poem, Desert Flowers, was probably written while he was recovering in El Ballah General Hospital, Palestine, early in 1943.
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Douglas had shown a talent for poetry since childhood – as well as a passion for all things military. At Oxford, where he was taught for a time by Edmund Blunden, he already knew his task as a poet: it was to fuse the "cynic and lyric" aspects of his nature to form "a balanced style". If he admired the first world war poets, he was determined not to follow their path with protests and pity. Such writing, as he said, would have been "tautological".
While serving in the north African campaign Douglas was wounded by a mine. This week's poem, Desert Flowers, was probably written while he was recovering in El Ballah General Hospital, Palestine, early in 1943.
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