the war remains of keith douglas and hughes boneless, substanceless, wanderers’,^44 suggestingthat the ceaseless search for cal-
careous structure is the fate of poets. And in ‘Famous Men’, written when he was 15
and included as the second poem in Hughes’s 1964 edition, accomplished figures
now ‘lie deep,|licked clean their skulls,|rest beautifully, staring’.^45 The poem
insists, ‘The quick movement of dactyls|does not compensate them,’ but we can
hear how skeletal materiality itself becomes associated with the quick physicality
attributed by Hughes to Douglas’s versification. The abiding ambition we find
throughout this poetry is the ambition to abide, as poems themselves constitute the
poet’s skeletal remains, challenging death with dactyls like skulls.
Lyric Front Lines
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In the autumn of 1941, Douglas was stationed at a convalescent depot at Nathanya,
in Palestine. The cause was a severe ear infection he had acquired in Cairo, but the
acuity of his ear, already praised by T. S. Eliot, seems to have developed in the course
of this posting; while there he wrote a handful of poems that reflect closely on his
poetic practice, and specifically on his distinctive form of lineation. At Nathanya he
spent his days exploring some four miles of deserted beach along the Mediterranean
coast, writing to his friend Jean Turner, ‘Well I have been walking beside the sea
waves and have rather unoriginally been inspired, presumably by the waves etc,
to produce 3 rather unoriginal poems,’^46 a facetious assessment with which critics
have tended sharply and quite reasonably to disagree. He tells his mother in a letter
of 26 October 1941, ‘I usually walk several miles along the sands,’ and the three
poemshewrote(‘TheHand’,‘Adams’,and‘TheSeaBird’)oweasmuchtothe
lines his steps made in the sand as to the breaking of the waves.^47 The originality
of these poems is in some measure a function of their line breaks, as epistolary
commentaries written by Hughes in 1988 on two of the poems demonstrate. In
these letters Hughes is struck anew, and in some sense clearly also as if for the
first time, by what in his ‘Introduction’ theprevious year he characterized as the
nimble balancing act performed by Douglas’s writing: ‘Each line gives a strong
impression of acrobatic balance involving the whole body.’^48 We have seen already
how Hughes, like Douglas before him, associates the movement of a man’s limbs
(active, nimble) with the kind of poetry each admired; these poems go still further
in aligning the lineaments of body and verse, limbs and lines.
(^44) Douglas, ‘The Poets’, inComplete Poems, 50. (^45) Douglas, ‘Famous Men’, ibid. 10.
(^46) Douglas to Jean Turner, n.d. [postmarked 20 Nov. 1941], inLetters, 203. Desmond Graham
asserts that ‘The poems certainly did not merit his dismissive comment’ (Graham,Keith Douglas,
1920–1944: A Biography(London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 131). William Scammell concurs:
‘his flippant judgement couldn’t have been further from the truth’ (Scammell, 47 Keith Douglas, 110).
48 Douglas to Marie J. Douglas, 26 Oct. 1941, inLetters, 201.
Hughes, ‘Introduction’, in Douglas,Complete Poems,p.xix.