Poets at War SIR,—Alan Ross should not have rushed into
print so quickly (Letters, November 25) to claim that in the 1950s 'no one ever thought otherwise than that Keith Douglas was the best poet to come out of the war,' and that this is still a 'common assumption.' On the day my review appeared John Carey in the New Statesman attacked Douglas's 'cramped' re- sponses and compared him very unfavourably with Alun Lewis. Mr Ross should consult some represen- tative anthologies. In John Holloway's Poems of the Mid-Century, published 1957, Douglas is not in- cluded, although the collection has a number of 1939-45 war poems. In Seven Centuries of Poetry, published 1955, A. N. Jeffares chose poems by Sidney Keyes and Alun Lewis, but not Douglas. In his recent anthology, The Terrible Rain: The War Poets, 1939-45, Brian Gardner comments that Douglas until recently 'has been comparatively neglected.' Con- sidering the virtues of Douglas's poems and Alamein to Zent-Zern, this neglect is indeed extraordinary. C. B. COX
20 Park Gates Drive. Cheadle Hulute, Cheshire
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