Collected Poems

Keyes Sidney

A nature poet by inclination, Sidney Keyes was drawn to the work of Holderlin and Rilke, taking them – paradoxically – to war against the Germans. They draw out his essentially Wordsworthian temperament; he was also touched by the very different imaginative worlds of Schiller and Paul Klee. A passion forthe microcosmic coexists with an ability to deal with large truths in his own voice or to enter into the imagination of other, of Clare and Yeats for example. Though he died young, his achievement is real. His dramatic monologues, his poems of landscape, of the weird and macabre, and his amstery of blank verse set him apart.

About the Author

Sidney Keyes was killed in action in Tunisia in 1943. He was twenty years old. With Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis he is regarded as one of the outstanding poets of World War II.

Even before he was an undergarduate, Sidney Keyes was something of a prodigy producing verse of a remarkable accomplishment. A celebrated Oxford poem, "Remember Your Lovers" ("Young men walking the open streets/Of death's republic, remember your lovers") was written in an exam room, when he had finsihed early.

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