sidney keyes in historical perspective for, as I propose to do here; so has Drummond Allison, killed in Italy in 1943,
whoseFortune Press volumeThe Yellow Night, containing three or four poems of
distinction, is his sole literary legacy.
Most descriptions of Keyes present him as a gothic pastoralist.^3 Those who see
him in this way can certainly present supporting evidence. A few weeks before he
was killed, Keyes stated: ‘I think I should have been born in the last century in
Oxfordshire or Wiltshire, instead of near London between two wars, because then
I might have been a good pastoral poet, instead of an uncomfortable metaphysical
without roots.’^4 My purpose in the present essay is to explore this contention as
fully as possible while withholding final assent from the conclusion to which it
points. There are uncomfortable moments throughout Keyes, but he is in the end a
more confident metaphysician than he suggests, as well as being a pastoral poet of
impressive, if intermittent, power.
Among the handful of literary historians and general readers who are aware
of him, Keyes is exclusively a poet of the private world. Michael Meyer, his
first editor and biographer, set the tone in his early sketch of his friend, a brief
memoir published in 1944 in the W. H. Heinemann journalThe Windmilland
subsequently expanded as the editorial preface toThe Collected Poems of Sidney
Keyesof 1945:
faint praise (‘Sidney Keyes...technically quite competent...[has] no experiences worth writing of’),
the third occurs when Douglas is trying out possible titles for his own projected book (‘The Iron
Trees...this sounds as if its aping Sidney Keyes...though’). See Keith Douglas,A Prose Miscellany,
ed. Desmond Graham (Manchester: Carcanet, 1985), 83, 119, 147.
(^3) See e.g. Michael Meyer,The Windmill, ed. Reginald Moore and Edward Lane (London: Heine-
mann, 1944), 57–9: ‘This, then, is the world of Sidney Keyes: a Kent garden, inhabited by firelight
shadows. Fear and guilt ruled him from the first. In the ordinary course of events, he would have been
an esoteric poet, a haunted countryman like John Clare. But the chance that destroyed him made him
the spokesman of a generation....The world of his imagination merged into the world of reality’. See
also Meyer’s ‘Memoir’, in Keyes,Collected Poems, ed. Michael Meyer (Manchester, Carcanet, 2002),
116–24: ‘Isolated with his nurse in the great house, except for the relations he saw at meals, he had
to create a world of his own to survive’ (p. 116). Where would English poetry and fiction be, one
wonders, without the isolated child in the great house? We can amuse ourselves, if so inclined, by
thinking of the child Sidney Keyes as a counterpart to Kay Harker, isolated in the big house, Seekings,
in Masefield’s two marvellous books for children,The Midnight FolkandThe Box of Delights.Like
Keyes, Kay Harker possesses ‘an almost supernatural power over animals’ (Meyer,Windmill, 57), as
does Kipling’s ‘Mowgli’. I am not saying that the figure of the isolated child, having to create a world
of its own to survive, doesn’t have a significant minor role in European culture and literature. Nor do
I deny to Keyes his rightful place in that company; his affinity with them must be acknowledged in
any attempt to come to terms with his art. In one aspect of his orientation he strikes me as being a
belated scion of the twentieth-century ‘great house’ poets—the Sitwells of Renishaw, Lady Dorothy
Wellesley at Penns in the Rocks, Vita Sackville-West of Sissinghurst Castle, and, by adoption, Eliot
of Garsington, Yeats of Coole Park, and Rilke of Duino. At his death Keyes’s estate was assessed at
£7,000 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), xxxi. 476),
a generous sum for 1943, that perhaps represents his share of his grandfather’s legacy. In the same
source Douglas’s estate is described as ‘negligible’. 4
Keyes, quoted in Meyer, ‘Memoir’, 118 n.