Poets at War
B. Cox writes with proper appreciation of Keith Douglas's poetry but I cannot understand his odd illusion that 'it was left to Ted Hughes in an article in The Critical Quarterly in 1963 and in an edition of Selected Poems in 1964. to claim that Douglas is one of the best English poets of this century.'
'The neglect of Keith Douglas was extraordinary,' Mr Cox asserts. But as far as I can remember no one ever thought otherwise than that Keith Douglas was the best poet to come out of the war. In your own columns, for example, I wrote (June 6, 1947) of Alamein to Zenz-Zeus that 'it forms one of the two or three classics that this war has produced.' (The 1947 edition contained sixteen poems at the end.) In a 1954 middle-page article on Douglas in The Times Literary Supplement (signed for some odd reason) I ended up: To me, Keith Douglas is the most sym- pathetic poet of his (which is my own) generation: he wrote the kind of poetry I should like to have written, which is the most any writer can say about another.'
Mine was not, in any sense, an original or dissent- ing opinion; what I wrote was a common assumption, then as now.
ALAN ROSS
Clayton Manor, Sussex
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