geoffrey hill
The creative artist in him never came into contact with human beings, but lived in the crazy
hauntedcountry of a child. All artists perhaps remain imaginatively at one age, and Keyes
was always three or four. He retained the distorting eye which transforms everything that
excites it into something grotesque and macabre.^5
I don’t understand what is meant here by the ‘distorting eye’ except as a device
put to occasional specific use in particular poems. Cinema photography held a
considerable fascination for Keyes; he especially admired German Expressionist
films of the 1920s, such asThe Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, on which he based his
poem ‘Holstenwall’.^6 But this was a generational thing: Keith Douglas also enjoyed
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—‘His taste for films’, we are told, ‘was insatiable and
catholic.’^7
Keyes’s great friend and fellow undergraduate at Queen’s College, Oxford, John
Heath-Stubbs, has claimed that he had
a particular admiration for certain minor poets who occupy a curious little trough between
the end of the high Romantic movement...and the beginning of high Victorian poetry....
These poets were Thomas Lovell Beddoes, George Darley and John Clare. He also admired
the serious poems of Thomas Hood.... These might be regarded as a generation of English
po`etes maudits.^8
Beddoes killed himself, Clare was confined in what used to be called lunatic asylums
from 1836, when he was aged 43, until his death in 1864 when he was 70.
The suggestion can be risked that Keyes was drawn to Clare less by his fate as a
po`ete maudit(though there is a hint of that in the poem ‘A Garland for John Clare’)
than by the cogent particularity of Clare’s style: ‘And sees the snow in feathers
pass|Winnowing by the window glass’; ‘And wisdom gossipd from the stars|Of
politics and bloody wars’ (the reference is to peasants busily consultingOld Moores
Almanack); or:
The shepherd too in great coat wrapt
Andstrawbandsroundhisstockingslapt
Wi plodding dog that sheltering steals
To shun the wind behind his heels...
While in the fields the lonly plough
Enjoys its frozen sabbath now.^9With due respect to Heath-Stubbs’s insights and analyses of the writers of that
period, I have to say that poetry of such fertile economy does not arise from any
(^5) Meyer,Windmill, 57. See n. 3 above.
(^6) Keyes, ‘Holstenwall’, inCollected Poems, 40. See also Meyer’s note on the poem, 132.
(^7) Desmond Graham,Keith Douglas 1920–1944: A Biography(London: Oxford University Press,
1974), 85.
(^8) John Heath-Stubbs,Hindsights: An Autobiography(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993), 111.
(^9) John Clare,The Shepherd’s Calendar, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield (London:
Oxford University Press, 1973), 1, 2, 3.