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SIDNEY KEYES IN
HISTORICAL
PERSPECTIVE
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Sidney Arthur Kilworth Keyes, born on 27 May 1922, was killed in action, in Tunisia,
on 29 April 1943, a few weeks short of his twenty-first birthday. At the time of his
death he was the author of one small book of verse,The Iron Laurel, published in the
summer of 1942, and of a second book ready for the press,The Cruel Solstice,which
appeared posthumously, late in 1943 or in early 1944.^1 Subsequently two further
posthumous volumes were put into print: theCollected Poemsof 1945 andMinos
of Crete,a book of plays and stories, with excerpts from letters and his notebook
(1948). The publisher in all four instances was Routledge, at that time under the
literary guidance of a courageous fighting poet of the First World War, thereafter a
mild philosophical anarchist, Herbert Read, DSO, MC. Read had begun to take an
interest in Keyes’s work as early as spring 1941 when he accepted for publication
an anthology of poems by eight Oxford undergraduates that Keyes co-edited with
Michael Meyer. Apart from Keyes himself, the most significant contributor was
Keith Douglas, whose name must inevitably be threaded through this appraisal
because his achievement is now so patent and secure.^2 Keyes has still to be fought
(^1) I take the year 1943 fromThe National Union Catalogue: Pre 1956 Imprints, ccvcv. 44. ‘Late’ is
my conjecture. I possess two copies ofThe Cruel Solstice. One imprint page (a) reads1943 Reprinted
1944 ; the other (b) hasFirst published January 1944 Reprinted April 1944,Reprinted June 1944.Both
title-pages give 1944. Volume (b) misspells the name of the dedicatee; volume (a) spells it correctly.
(^2) Keyes’s name occurs three times in Douglas’ssurviving papers. None of these is at all laudatory.
One has to do with business (‘Sidney Keyes of The Cherwell will know about this’), one bestows