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sidney keyes in historical perspective 

deny ‘communication’; the ‘authority’ of poetry is its ‘communication’; to ‘shape a
thing’is to ‘communicate’ in a way that is not the same thing at all as conveying
information. ‘The call of poetry in word and thought is to be final’, Williams
wroteinaprivateletterwhichKeyescouldnotpossiblyhaveseen.^37 Nonetheless,
I would say that he strove for finality—or that approximation to finality which is
the equipoise of technical mastery and the finally untameable nature of language.
As already pointed out, Wordsworth has a number of focusing, or tuning,
words—‘blind’, ‘naked’, ‘wild’, ‘blank’; to these should be added the word
‘power’—Williams lists some of them in the second chapter ofThe English
Poetic Mind.^38 InThe Prelude‘our simple childhood’ is particularly associated with
something ‘That hath more power than all the elements’.^39 Andattheendofthe
same book Wordsworth writes (and again Williams marks the passage):

Visionary Power

Attends upon the motions of the winds

Embodied in the mystery of words.

There darkness makes abode, and all the host

Of shadowy things do work their changes there,

As in a mansion like their proper home.^40

There is a deeply moving penultimate entry in Keyes’s 1942–3 Notebook: ‘I am
thankful that my intellect is not strong enough to master my passions, nor my
passions my intellect: for this is the true condition of creation. I am thankful that
I can see myself as funny and ineffective, but not my powers.’^41 The crux, then, is
power,orpowers. Keyes, like all poets, desires to transform language into power.
We judge poets to a considerable extent by their ability—or inability—to effect
such a transformation.
My only reservation about those who knew Keyes well and who wrote about
him—Heath-Stubbs, Meyer, among others—is that they do not always take care
to chart the difference between strangeness of personality and the strange aloofness
that is the particular power of achieved poetry. Even Heath-Stubbs, in his elegy for
Keyes, ‘The Divided Ways’, focuses excessively on the goblin-like elements in his
personality:

Butnow,atlast,Idareavowmyterror

Of the pale vampire by the cooling grate;

The enemy face that doubled every loved one;

My secret fear of him and his cold heroes.^42

The arbitrary power of the achieved poem is a quite other power.

(^37) Williams, quoted in Hadfield,Charles Williams, 133.
(^38) See Williams,English Poetic Mind, 11.
(^39) Wordsworth,The Prelude, 163; V. 509 (1850 text).
(^40) Ibid. 168; V. 595–600 (1850 text).
(^41) Keyes, ‘Notebook: 1942–43’, inMinos of Crete, 165.
(^42) Heath-Stubbs, ‘The Divided Ways’, inThe Divided Ways(London: Routledge, 1946), 56.