sidney keyes in historical perspective of his audience in a way impossible by any other means.’ ‘He is neither propagating
adoctrine nor ‘‘expressing himself’’; rather he is letting the world express him and
giving himself entirely to something outside himself.’ Nonetheless, by so doing, ‘the
artist is...directly contributing not only to the growth of the individual spirit, but
to the efficiency of society.’^69
We must endeavour to weigh the poetry of Keyes and Douglas, and Allison and
Alun Lewis, all four killed in 1943–4, with and against the priorities of the Second
World War and of the 1930s which culminated in that war. For instance, both Keyes
and Allison wrote poems in 1942 celebrating the Soviet general Timoshenko.^70
John Guenther, in his compact biography of Keyes, refers to Timoshenko’s name
being ‘in the newspapers’^71 during September 1942, and there is an editorial note
confirming this fact and date in the Orwell–Angus edition of George Orwell’s
writings.^72 Whatever briefr ́eclameTimoshenko enjoyed in the British newspapers,
it was, it seems, a seven days’ wonder. I cite it here as a counterweight to the notion
discussed above that Keyes is prevailingly a poet of the private world.
Keyes’s ‘Timoshenko’, a poor poem that cannot surmount its own hyperbole and
is coarsened by the obvious and inert (‘His eyes grew cold as lead’), is significant
only in that it shows Keyes attempting to project an image in cinematic terms (‘He
turned, and his great shadow on the wall...’). The poem, dated September 1942,
goes for the symbolically projected decisive moment: what we call fate, destiny,
issuing from the solitary act of decision. It shows, also, a young poet taking his
bearings from the public domain, aDaily MailorNews of the Worldtype of
newsworthiness. It is as if Keyes were seeking to emulate the public oratory of
British poetry of the Spanish Civil War. Rather than talking of his ‘distorting eye’, it
might be closer to the mark to suggest that he tried briefly to blend Expressionism
with Socialist Realism, and that the attempt failed. ‘Timoshenko’ has always struck
me as a somewhat naive hymn to Soviet ‘efficiency’, and to that extent entirely
characteristic of public eulogy of its period. It needs to be added that in certain
conditions distortion is normative, and that in such poems as ‘Schiller Dying’ and
‘The Foreign Gate’, among others, Keyes accepts this as given and is happy (I mean
technically happy) to record it.
Desmond Graham has noted that Keith Douglas, shortly before his death, was
‘once again acting out the conflict between too much and too little feeling’.^73 This is
well said, and gives us a way into reading such early and late poems as ‘The Poets’,
‘An Exercise Against Impatience’, the ‘Songs’, ‘This is the Dream’, ‘On a Return
(^69) Keyes, ‘Artist in Society’, 146.
(^70) See Keyes, ‘Timoshenko’, inCollected Poems, 85; Drummond Allison,The Yellow Night: Poems
1940–41–42–43(London: The Fortune Press, 1945), 24 (‘For J. G.’, final phrase—‘Christ and
Timoshenko share his fears’).
(^71) Guenther,Sidney Keyes, 133.
(^72) George Orwell,The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ii:My Country Right
or Left, 1940–1943 73 , ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 499 n. 3.
Graham,Keith Douglas 1920–1944, 244.