Keith Douglas

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature.

Keith Douglas (1920-1944) began writing when he was at school at Christ’s Hospital School, London, continued at Oxford, and thereafter in the army and in the Middle East. By the time he was killed in Normandy, aged only twenty-four, in June 1944, he had achieved a body of work that singled him out as the most brilliant and promising English poet of the Second World War. The present pioneering selection of Keith Douglas’s work, by Ted Hughes, was first published in 1964.