the war remains of keith douglas and hughes begins with letters of Plath and Hughes describing the poetic and personal impact on
themof reading Douglas in 1962, and ends with Hughes’s critical return to Douglas
a quarter-century later, the intensity of his engagement undiminished. Both men
represent, in their persons and their poetry, the human wreckage of the European
wars, which include the dead but also what Hughes suggests are the equally pitiable
survivors. The identities (the ‘truth of a man’) of the quick and the dead lie
everywhere exposed in the detritus of war, and this essay’s three parts follow the
stripping down of the remains, moving from the battlefield litter of loot and corpses
in the first part, to the skeletal in the second, and then finally to disarticulated bones
in the third. Each of these remnants serves as a figure—for Douglas, and, following
him, Hughes—for the materialization of poetic practice itself.
Both Hughes and Plath are explicit regarding the profound impact on them of
reading Douglas. Hughes’s letter to his sister Olwyn Hughes, written in early June
1962 from Court Green, the home he shared with Plath in Devon, captures his
personal and professional excitement over this discovery:
Do you know Keith Douglas’ poetry?...A wonderful poet—utterly neglected. So I wrote a
BBC programme, enthusing, & received a letter from his mother...she’s 75, & living from
job to job as an old lady’s companion, andwas pathetically interested to hear if my broadcast
encouraged anybody to notice her son’s poetry. Anyway, Hutchinson’s wrote, & asked if I
would write a foreword, if they republished his collected poems....He’s a very fine poet,
& must have been an admirable sort of bloke. Infinitely the best of that 1920 generation, &
one of the best ever, to say he was killed at 24!^3
Plath’s account, from a letter to her mother, Aurelia Plath, from Court Green the
same week, dated 7 June 1962, recounts similar information:
Ted did a beautiful [BBC] program on a marvelous young British poet, Keith Douglas, killed
in the last war, saying how shocking it was no book of his was in print. In the next mail he
got grateful letters and inscribed books from the poet’s 75-year-old, impoverished mother
and a suggestion from a publisher that Ted write the foreword to a new edition of the book.
Both of us mourn this poet immensely and feel he would have been like a lovely big brother
to us. His death is really a terrible blow and we are trying to resurrect his image and poems
in this way.^4
Both letters tell the same story of Hughes’s efforts on radio and potentially in print to
promote Douglas’s reputation. Hughes places Douglas’s work in literary-historical
contexts, first among other Second World War poets (‘that 1920 generation’), then
among all poets (‘one of the best ever’). Yet, while he historicizes Douglas, he also
personalizes him, positing that he ‘must have been an admirable sort of bloke.’ Plath,
whose equal fervour for Douglas is omitted in her husband’s account, intensifies
(^3) Hughes to Olwyn Hughes, n.d. [June 1962], Olwyn Hughes Papers (MSS 980), Manuscript,
Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
(^4) Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Schober Plath, 7 June 1962, inLetters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963,
ed. Aurelia Schober Plath (London: Faber, 1992), 456.