sidney keyes in historical perspective of the day. A good place to look for parallels to it would be inTransformation
Two,edited by Stefan Schimanski and Henry Treece, published in 1944,^47 or in
Focus One,edited by B. Rajan and Andrew Pearse, published in 1945.^48 These
volumes were issued from such London publishing houses as Lindsay Drummond
and Denis Dobson; one might even say that the contributors shared a house style.
It is a small but not unuseful corrective to the image of Keyes as a kind of poetic
throw-back to see him as sharing, albeit briefly, in the intellectual petty commerce
of the day.
‘The Artist in Society’ is a significant document, and not only for readers of
Keyes’s poetry. It is made unnecessarily opaque because he fixes one of his crucial
points with a quotation from a poem in German for which no source is given and
which is also left untranslated. It is in fact four lines from Rilke’s ninthDuino Elegy
and, in the 1939 translation by Leishman and Spender, reads as follows:
Hereis the time for the Tellable,hereis its home.
Speak and proclaim. More than ever
the things we can live with are falling away, and their place
being oustingly taken up by an imageless act.^49It is not an exaggeration to state that the poetic craft of Sidney Keyes works toward
a speaking and proclaiming that is obscured neither by a demand for documentary
realism nor by a cult of art for art’s sake.
For Rilke the ‘home’ of the ‘Tellable’ is the world unsubdued by utilitarian
sanctions, simply itself irradiated by the vision of the Rilkean seer. In Keyes’s own
words, the poet ‘is neither propagating a doctrine, nor ‘‘expressing himself’’; rather,
he is letting the world express him and giving himself entirely to something outside
himself ’.^50 This is striking in its pure Rilkean tone, though at the same time it is
reminiscent of certain phrases in Yeats’s great eulogy for the dead J. M. Synge: ‘he
gave his country what it needed, an unmoved mind where there is a perpetual last
day, a trumpeting and coming up to judgement.’^51
In the present cultural climate, there are going to be two sharply divided views
among the literary public: one, that such claims and statements are obnoxiously
esoteric; the other, that they are uncannily on target. I have to declare my position
among those who would maintain the latter view. Speak and proclaim. But I am
getting ahead of myself and must recapitulate.
(^47) Stefan Schimanski and Henry Treece (eds.),Transformation Two(London: Lindsay Drummond,
1944). One might note here, Richard Church, ‘Strength for Tomorrow’ (pp. 131–6). Keyes wrote an
important letter to Church, setting out his poetic aims. See John Guenther, 48 Sidney Keyes, 152–3.
B. Rajan and Andrew Pearse (eds.),Focus One(London: Denis Dobson, 1945). Here one might
consider D. J. Enright, ‘The Muse in Confusion’ (pp. 86–9), and Julian Symons, ‘Of Crisis and Dismay’
(pp. 90–111).
(^49) Rainer Maria Rilke,Duino Elegies, ed. and trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (London:
Hogarth Press, 1939), 84–5. 50
51 Keyes, ‘The Artist in Society’, inMinos of Crete, 146.
W. B. Yeats,The Cutting of an Agate(London: Macmillan, 1919), 129.