ABSTRACT
Scandinavian drama and John Heath-Stubbs as a poet and scholar. Keyes won instant fame after his death in 1943, just short of his twenty-first birthday; his posthumous second collection The Cruel Solstice went into several editions and his Collected Poems were published in 1945. Keyes's precocious, hot-house talent has not worn well; he was a sensitive, bookish poet, of great technical accomplishment, but without very much to say. Keith Douglas's reputation was slower to take off, and it was several years before his poems were properly edited, but he is now generally accepted as the finest British poet of the Second
World War. Drummond Allison was twenty-two when he died. Like Keyes, and unlike
Douglas, he had not seen enough action to write any 'war poems' in the strict sense. Posthumously, he has fared worst of the three. He had prepared a collection of poems, The Yellow Night, and had corrected the proofs shortly before he died; it was published some months later. Publication by the Fortune Press placed Allison in distinguished company, but, as many other poets found,
it did nothing to ensure adequate distribution or a wide readership. In 1978 the Whiteknights Press at Reading University published The Poems of Drummond Allison edited by Michael Sharp, in an edition of 200 copies. The new
collection, brought out privately by Allison's old school, Bishop's Stortford College, in an edition of 300, contains a number of previously unpublished poems, mostly early. It takes over the notes and other material from the Whiteknights edition (including one error: the Bulldog Drummond stories,
whence derived Allison's forename, were by H.C. McNeile, writing as 'Sapper', not Ian Hay). One salutes the enterprise, whilst regretting that Allison's work seems doomed to appear only in fugitive editions.
