Keith Castellain Douglas was a British poet of the Second World War. He was known for the poems reflecting his military service experiences in North Africa during 1942 and 1943.
Made in a reportorial manner, his verses were full of irony and eloquence, and showed the misfortunes of war without expression of patriotism or protest typical for soldier poetry.
Background
Keith Castellain Douglas was born on January 24, 1920, in Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent, United Kingdom. He was a son of Keith Sholto Douglas, a captain and the Military Cross recipient, and Marie Josephine Castellain.
Douglas’s mother suffered from encephalitis lethargica, and when the boy was six his father left the family. It hurt Keith who disagreed to meet his father after.
Douglas demonstrated his writing skills and passion for art at an early age. The first poetry collection was done by his teens. He loved drawing and often made sketches.
Education
Keith Castellain Douglas spent the most part of his childhood at boarding schools because of the early divorce of his parents.
Although the family was extremely poor, Douglas managed to enter a free school named Christ's Hospital in 1931.
Keith was a rebellious but brilliant student excelling in his studies and athletics, especially in the school's Officers Training Corps. Besides, he demonstrated his big talent in drawing and painting. The first published poem, ‘Dejection’, was issued in the famous journal New Verse while Douglas was still at the institution.
In 1938, Keith Douglas received a scholarship which allowed him to pursue his education at Merton College of the University of Oxford. During a couple of years he spent there, he was fully involved in the local literary life editing the college’s newspaper. He learned History and English under a famous poet Edmund Blunden. It was Blunden who encouraged Douglas to publish his poetry collection.
The start of Keith Castellain Douglas’s career can be counted from the editing activity at a weekly student newspaper of Oxford University called Cherwell during his studies at Merton College from 1938 to 1940. The same time, the six of his poems were chosen to be published in Eight Oxford Poets, an anthology organized by his fellows Michael Meyer and Sidney Keyes.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Douglas subscribed as a volunteer for military duty. He started his military service in 1940 in the cavalry at 2nd Derbyshire Yeomanryat at Ripon. A year later, in July, the regiment was sent to North Africa where he served in Cairo and Palestine. While there, Douglas contributed a fiction called 'Death of a Horse' to Citadel periodical.
Wishing more combat experience, Douglas moved near to El Alamein where he assumed command of a tank troop at the beginning of the El Alamein offensive in October 1942. During the pause he made to cure the wound received a year later, Douglas wrote the most famous of his poems, including a kind of a war memoir ‘Alamein to Zem Zem’ which gathered the works based on the author’s combat experiences accompanied by his own illustrations.
Following his regiment on its way to the United Kingdom in order to prepare it for the D-Day invasion of France, Keith Douglas tried to publish ‘Alamein to Zem Zem’ and a poetry collection titled ‘Bête Noire’. He published fiction in Lilliput magazine.
On June 6, 1944, Keith Castellain Douglas participated in the D-Day invasion of Normandy. He was killed by enemy mortar fire three days later.
Many poems by Douglas were published and featured both in various anthologies and literary periodicals after his death, including 'The Little Red Mouth' in Stand magazine and 'Poets in This War' in Times Literary Supplement.
Keith Castellain Douglas believed that the war was the most appropriate literary topic of his time. He insisted that a soldier could write authentically about war like nobody else.
He was also obsessed with death, including his own. In many of his verses, the poet shared a prediction that he would not survive the war.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"Perhaps the only poet of his generation to build successfully on the achievement of [World War I era soldier-poets] Wilfrid Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, he is regarded as the finest British war poet of World War II and, by many, the finest poet of his generation." Desmond Graham, poet, critic and editor of war poetry
"[Douglas] truly becomes, with ‘Vergissmeinnicht,’ a poet for whom literary history and geopolitical history match: stereotypical boundaries are broken down." Linda M. Shires, educator, and writer
"[Douglas’s work] is not just that of a broken landscape or an exiled destroyed heart, but that of a civil war in which he sees and plays both sides." Linda M. Shires, educator, and writer
"[Douglas] invented a style that seems able to deal poetically with whatever it comes up against." Ted Hughes, poet
Interests
art
Sport & Clubs
swimming, horseback riding, rugby
Connections
Keith Castellain Douglas had a romantic relationship with a Chinese student, a daughter of a diplomat, Betty Sze. She turned down his offer of marriage.
Although he tried to live with another woman, Milena Guiterrez Penya, Sze stayed his unrequited love for the rest of his life and the source of his best romantic works.