the war remains of keith douglas and hughes offers this answer: ‘because there is nothing new, from a soldier’s point of view,
aboutthis war except its mobile character’.^10 The quality of energetic momentum
that Hughes hears in Douglas’s verse is attributed by Douglas to the distinctive
characteristic of the War itself.
In June 1962 Hughes wrote to Marie Douglas, ‘Thank you for so kindly writing
out the copy of [Douglas’s essay] ‘‘The Nature of Poetry’’. Thank you, too, for
offering me a copy of his book. If you would sign it, I would count it among my
most valuable possessions.’^11 Douglas’s brief manifesto, ‘On the Nature of Poetry’,
written while an undergraduate at Oxford and about a page long, begins: ‘Poetry is
like a man, whom thinking you know all his movements and appearance you will
presently come upon in such a posture that for a moment you can hardly believe
it a position of the limbs you know.’^12 Douglas explains that by this he means that
poetry inevitably moves beyond any limits one attempts to set for it, but his own
poetry is everywhere shaped by the mobility of unexpected masculine postures, in
both its form and its content. Already in 1964 Hughes considers himself to know
Douglas’s limbs, in their energy and grace; his enthusiasm for this muscular poetics
has, if anything, gained momentum in his 1987 ‘Introduction’, in which he lauds
the ‘the naked physique of the poetry’, its ‘tensile strength’.^13
‘It is still very much alive, even providing life,’^14 Hughes declares of Douglas’s
poetry in 1964, and indeed, while his own father’s war service immobilizes the
household, Douglas’s poetry is so life-giving that it has the ability even to animate
the dead. For Douglas, the dead are dynamic—perhaps more so, during war, than
the living, whose movements are everywhere conscripted and checked, whether by
the enemy or by the military superiors from whom Douglas repeatedly courted
court marshalling for his openly insubordinate responses to their authority, as
with, as Edna Longley puts it, his ‘desertiontothe battle of Alamein’.^15 Enjoying
an easy mobility, the dead are understood to be active and ongoing participants
in the War, as corpses ‘dispose themselves’ companionably,^16 while the living,
as Hughes observes in his 1987 introduction to Douglas, ‘are hardly more than
deluded variants of the dead’.^17
This consistent and deliberate confusion between the living and the dead is a
central pattern ofAlamein to Zem Zem, Douglas’s memoir of his combat in the
desert war in North Africa, which was published posthumously. (Marie Douglas
sent Hughes a copy after his broadcast, and Hughes wrote in gratitude, ‘I’ve been
(^10) Keith Douglas, ‘Poets in This War’, inThe Letters, ed. Desmond Graham (Manchester: Carcanet,
2000), 352. 11
12 Hughes to Marie J. Douglas, n.d. [June 1962], British Library Manuscripts, Add. 59833.
Douglas, ‘On the Nature of Poetry’, inTheCompletePoems,ed.DesmondGrahamwithan
introduction by Ted Hughes (London: Faber, 2000; 1st pub. by Oxford University Press, 1987), 133.
(^13) Hughes, ‘Introduction’, in Douglas,Complete Poems, pp. xix and xxix.
(^14) Hughes, ‘Introduction’, in Douglas,Selected Poems, 11.
(^15) Edna Longley, ‘ ‘‘Shit or Bust’’ ’, 95. (^16) Douglas, ‘Aristocrats’, inComplete Poems, 117.
(^17) Hughes, ‘Introduction’, ibid. p. xxiii.