ABSTRACT
Both Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis, with all their differences in style, purpose and achievement, can be seen as belonging to that line of English poets, stretching from Chaucer to Hardy and beyond, poets whose involvement with the bread and meat of daily life, with the elemental experiences of birth, growth, love, hate, joy and grief, fear and hope, was total; whose subject-matter was always immediately at hand in the experience, personal or vicarious, of the moment, and whose myth-making was not the result of grandiose schemes to carve great monuments in time but came naturally with their identification with the rest of humankind and the honesty and vitality of their seeing and saying. Although both Douglas and Lewis possessed good minds and were interested in the arts, in ideas and in the life of the imagination, their first concern was with the physical rather than the metaphysical, which could look after itself, and they both strove to wrest their message and music from the rhythms and idioms of the common speech of their time and place and, however far they might have travelled in space, each remained, as a poet, obdurately of this island. The same cannot be said of the third young soldierpoet who lost his life in the Second World War, Sidney Keyes.
