ABSTRACT
Neither Keith Douglas nor Sidney Keyes showed in their poetry any concern with social or political problems, indeed it would be impossible to say from a reading of their verse in what direction their political sympathies lay, and Alun Lewis, though in his private life firmly on the side of social egalitarianism and justice, wrote little poetry that could be called committed in the sense that it was written from a coherent ideological position towards which it hoped to draw the reader's sympathies. Roy Fuller, who served in the Royal Navy and happily survived the war to win high regard as poet, novelist and, until recently, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, was a different kind of writer; he was twenty-nine years old when he was called up and had been writing and publishing poetry during the thirties and had already forged for himself a style which, with little adaptation, would be able to deal with the experiences of service life in time of war. This style owed a good deal to the more solid elements in Auden's poetry: the accommodation of contemporary speech rhythms within prescribed verse-forms, imagery drawn from the familiar objects of twentieth-century urban life, the employment of unexpected but precise epithets, the ability to sustain argument without lapsing into prosiness and to modulate from the colloquial to the lyrical or restrained rhetorical without grinding the gears. If Fuller lacks some of the formal brilliance, versatility and occasional magic of Auden he also escapes the daftness, the arch chumminess that sometimes
deface Auden's poems. I do not mean to suggest that Fuller's poetry is dull; on the contrary it is witty, intelligent and almost invariably honestly and deeply felt, but sometimes his approach to his material seems a little too tight-reined so that while he has things in common with Auden and, to a lesser extent, MacNeice, he is rather slower on his feet than the first and carries a bit more weight than the second, lacking something of the sparkle of both.
