the war remains of keith douglas and hughes most frequently anthologized poems, and thus itself an example of at least that form
ofliterary survival. Though a poem about death and decay, for Hughes it suggests
life itself; he declares of the poem in notes in the Emory University archives, ‘I
know very little poetry as utterly alive and invigorating as this.’^32 Douglas posits
that ‘the processes of earth’ will ‘strip off the colour and the skin:|take the brown
hair and blue eye|and leave me simpler than at birth’.^33 While the skin is simplified
by time’s eating, the skeleton can be subjected to assessment, however limited:
‘Of my skeleton perhaps|so stripped, a learned man will say|‘‘He was of such a
type and intelligence,’’ no more.’ Though perhaps leaving ‘no more’ to be said, the
skeleton nevertheless leaves a substance that may be exposed to the judgement of
posterity. Hughes wrote on the flyleaf of Desmond Graham’s biography of Keith
Douglas, ‘Poets and pigs are only valued when they’re dead,’^34 acomparisonthat
is not necessarily despairing. While poets and pigs are dissected and subjected to
calculated appraisal after their deaths, they may also appreciate in value. In Douglas’s
poems, skeletal remains do not simplify, but instead complicate the dead; desiccated,
eaten by dogs, strangely indissoluble, bones demand the discrimination of the living.
In an undated four-page letter to Olwyn Hughes that, given its internal references,
must have been written in the period soon after the epistolary exchanges of Hughes
and Plath with which this essay began, we can witness the reach of Douglas’s skeletal
hand. Hughes writes while in the midst of separating from Plath (about whom he
tells his sister, ‘as soon as I clear out, she’ll start making a life of her own, friends
of her own, interests of her own’). He recounts what we might consider a Second
World War anxiety dream (‘I dreamed Hitler came to me, furious, demanding
that I carry out the commands instantly’), but does not connect this apparition of
the Fuhrer either to his infuriated wife or to the war poet whose editing project ̈
he was embarking upon. He writes with a kind of breezy confidence about this
project and what it might portend: ‘Faber’s commissioned me to edit a selection of
Keith Douglas’ poems, of which I’m very fond. With an introduction. I’ll gradually
become the guiding taste at Faber’s, when Eliot retires—it would be an amusing
coup. I suggested they do Douglas.’^35 We can hear the ways in which the mention of
the Douglas edition is bound together with a larger, only partly facetious, ambition
toreplaceT.S.Eliot—who,asithappens,hadwrittenDouglasahighlyencouraging
letter in 1941, calling his poems ‘extremely promising’, and telling him, ‘you have
definitely an ear’.^36
But Douglas’s influence in this period is reflected still more in Hughes’s poetic
ambitions than in his editorial ones. Several poems inWodwo, Hughes’s first
volume of poetry after publishing his editions of Douglas and Plath, are littered
(^32) Hughes, Ted Hughes Papers (MSS 644).
(^33) Douglas, ‘Simplify me when I’m dead’, inComplete Poems, 74.
(^34) Hughes, quoted in Desmond Graham, ‘An Unwilling Biographer’,PN Review47, 12/3 (1985), 23.
(^35) Hughes to Olwyn Hughes, n.d., Olwyn Hughes Papers (MSS 980).
(^36) T. S. Eliot to Keith Douglas, 15 Feb. 1941, in Douglas,Letters, 164.