Sidney Keyes: Collected Poems (2002)•
Sidney Keyes (1922-1943)Sidney Keyes: Collected Poems (1945 / 1988)
[April, 2026]
The Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes. Ed. Michael Meyer. 1945. Rev. ed. London: Routledge, 1988.
Finborough Theatre: Remember Your Lovers – The Poetry of Sidney Keyes (19/8/2025)
World War II Poets
I suppose, for many people, the subject is neatly encapsulated by Cecil Day-Lewis's mordant poem "Where are the War Poets?", from his 1943 collection Word Over All:
Certainly the World War II poets - the ones writing in English, at any rate - have never had quite the same romantic allure as Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Thomas and the rest of the Great War squad. I've discussed the subject in rather more detail here.They who in folly or mere greed Enslaved religion, markets, laws, Borrow our language now and bid Us to speak up in freedom’s cause. It is the logic of our times, No subject for immortal verse — That we who lived by honest dreams Defend the bad against the worse.
And yet they're probably just as interesting as writers - taken individually, that is. It's hard to see them as really constituting any sort of a group.
What I've done here is to try and single out a few poets from the English-speaking world who've become identified, for better or worse, with the Second World War. I've excluded American poets such as James Dickey, Randall Jarrell, Lincoln Kirstein, Karl Shapiro, and Richard Wilbur as I feel that they were fighting a significantly different war: one which began in 1941 rather than 1939, and one dominated more by the Navy and the Air Force than the P.B.I [Poor Bloody Infantry]. There is, no doubt, an equally important tale to be told there, but probably by someone better informed than me.
I have, however, included one Commonwealth poet - from New Zealand, as it happens - to even up the coverage of the various theatres of war. To be honest, it's mostly dominated by the exigencies of my book collection. I have copies of books by all the poets discussed here (with the exception of Henry Reed and Alan Ross). The former only published one book of poems in his lifetime, and the latter is a poet I have to confess to reading - much to my benefit - for the first time while writing this post.
Since I'm trying to avoid adding new books to my already unrealistically unwieldy collection at present, this one is motivated not by the purchase of a new volume, but by being reminded of some I already own. In the process of compiling a post about Rainer Maria Rilke, I remembered that I'd first learnt about him from references in the works of Sidney Keyes.
It may be a bit of an over-simplification, but I still think it can be useful to think of British poetry over the ages in terms of a fundamental conflict between the officially sanctioned and the instinctively rebellious: Hons and Rebels, in other words.
The names and personnel shift, as do the precise terms of engagement, but this conflict between the ruling class and folk culture recurs again and again in British literary history: whether it be the cosmopolitan idiom of Chaucer against the rough Anglo-Saxon alliteration of Langland, or the insouciant rhymed insolence of Lord Byron against the visionary passion of William Blake, or even the radical disjunctions of Pound and Eliot against the pastoral torpor of the Georgian Anthologies. There's always been a "saving the appearances" side and a fanatical, revolutionary side amongst the poets of any given era.
During the First World War, the battle was between the up-and-coming Modernists against the nostalgic backwash of the Georgians. A poet such as the young Wilfred Owen found himself caught in the middle, neither fish nor fowl. On the one hand it was: "I am held peer by the Georgians" (as he remarked in a letter to his mother); on the other hand there was that draft preface to his poems: "Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."
In that particular case, the initially radical Imagists and Vorticists became the ruling class after the war, only to be opposed in their turn as apolitical turncoats by the Leftist poets of the 1930s: Auden, Spender, Day-Lewis et al.
Which leads us to the situation in the 1940s. Auden and Isherwood had left for greener pastures in the United States; Spender had become a kind of professional diplomat of letters, Cecil Day-Lewis was well on his way to the Poet Laureateship he would assume when the present, long-lived incumbent, John Masefield, finally died.
Which left the field open to what George Orwell referred to as "a bunch of b- fools called The New Apocalyptics." Their leading light was Dylan Thomas (though he never formally accepted the role), and their personnel included Henry Treece, Alex Comfort, Kathleen Raine and George Barker. They espoused a more intuitive, myth-attuned verse, appropriate to the collapse of European civilisation which seemed the most likely consequence of the latest war.
As an organised movement, they'd largely sputtered out by 1945, though many of them went on to long writing careers in the post-war years. The reaction against these would-be poetic shamans, however, greatly assisted the rise of what would eventually be known as the Movement: a series of bland young men in suits who were determined to avoid any rhetorical or ideological excess in favour of straightforward, no-nonsense "Englishness". Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis were their leading lights.
These, then, were the issues that preoccupied the poets gathered here, in their various idiosyncratic ways. We have Modernists such as Keith Douglas and Lawrence Durrell, Mythologisers such as Sidney Keyes and Henry Treece, as well as as such future Movement luminaries as Roy Fuller and (perhaps) Alan Ross. Others, such as the tormented working-class Welsh idealist Alun Lewis and the urbane Kendrick Smithyman defy such easy classification.
You'll note that my selection of authors is very close to the line-up chosen by poet and war-veteran Vernon Scannell in his pioneering Not Without Glory: The Poets of the Second World War, which includes "essays on the following poets: Keith Douglas; Alun Lewis; Sidney Keyes; Roy Fuller; Alan Ross and Charles Causley; Henry Reed and others ..." I've added some further names to his, but excluded the American poets he also discusses, for reasons explained above:
- Charles Causley (1917-2003)
- Keith Douglas (1920-1944)
- Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990)
- Gavin Ewart (1916-1995)
- Roy Fuller (1912-1991)
- Sidney Keyes (1922–1943)
- Alun Lewis (1915-1944)
- John Pudney (1909-1977)
- Henry Reed (1914-1986)
- Alan Ross (1922-2001)
- Kendrick Smithyman (1922-1995)
- Henry Treece (1911-1966)
- Anthologies & Secondary Literature
Books I own are marked in bold:
At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux
I walked where in their talking graves
And shirts of earth five thousand lay,
When history with ten feasts of fire
Had eaten the red air away.
'I am Christ's boy,' I cried. 'I bear
In iron hands the bread, the fishes.
I hang with honey and with rose
This tidy wreck of all your wishes.
'On your geometry of sleep
The chestnut and the fir-tree fly,
And lavender and marguerite
Forge with their flowers an English sky.
'Turn now towards the belling town
Your jigsaws of impossible bone,
And rising read your rank of snow
Accurate as death upon the stone.'
Above your easy heads my prayers
I said with syllables of clay.
'What gift,' I asked, 'shall I bring now
Before I weep and walk away?'
Take, they replied, the oak and laurel.
Take our fortune of tears and live
Like a spendthrift lover. All we ask
Is the one gift you cannot give.
Charles Causley ... was a Cornish poet, school teacher and writer. His work is often noted for its simplicity and directness as well as its associations with folklore, legends and magic, especially when linked to his native Cornwall.
... Causley left school at 16, working as a clerk in a builder's office. He played in a semi-professional dance band, and wrote plays — one of which was broadcast on the BBC West Country service before World War II.
He enlisted in the Royal Navy in 1940 and served as an ordinary seaman during the Second World War, firstly aboard the destroyer HMS Eclipse in the Atlantic, at shore bases in Gibraltar and northwest England. Later he served in the Pacific on the aircraft carrier HMS Glory, after promotion to petty officer.
Causley later wrote about his wartime experiences (and their longer-term impact on him) in his poetry, and also in a book of short stories, Hands to Dance and Skylark.
... After demobilisation in 1946, he took advantage of a government scheme to train as a teacher at Peterborough. He then worked full-time as a teacher at his old school for over 35 years ...
He was much in demand at poetry readings in the United Kingdom and worldwide — the latter travels were sometimes as part of Arts Council and British Council initiatives. He also made many television and radio appearances over the post-war period, particularly for the BBC in the West Country, and as the presenter for many years of the BBC Radio 4 series Poetry Please.- Wikipedia: Charles Causley
The Charles Causley poem reprinted above figured prominently in the recent British D-Day anniversary film The Great Escaper. Michael Caine accompanies his friend Arthur (played by John Standing) to the cemetery mentioned in its title, where the latter finally gets up the nerve to visit his brother's grave for the very first time, mainly because - as a bomber pilot - he feels responsible for his death.
It's a moving moment - though a slightly illogical one. And it's rather a weird poem, too. It's as if a huge amount of emotion is being expended for reasons which are never made quite clear to the reader. And yet, I've written elsewhere about my great admiration for Causley's ballads and children's verse.
His work certainly tends more towards the Bardic than the Movement side of post-war verse. You can place him more readily in the company of Robert Graves and Ted Hughes (who wrote an glowing preface for Causley's Collected Poems for Children) than alongside Movement poets such as Philip Larkin or Roy Fuller.
Working-class, Cornish, Populist rather than Academic - all of these aspects of his writing are very much in line with the 'dissenting' side of English poetry. If one hears the poem above as part-sermon, part-allegory, it begins to become into better focus: a little like Stanley Spencer's great picture The Resurrection of the Soldiers:
-
Poetry:
- Farewell, Aggie Weston (1951)
- Survivor's Leave (1953)
- Union Street (1957)
- Johnny Alleluia (1961)
- Underneath the Water (1968)
- Secret Destinations (1984)
- Twenty-One Poems (1986)
- A Field of Vision (1988)
- Collected Poems (1975)
- Collected Poems, 1951-2000: Revised Edition. London: Picador, 2000.
- Figure of 8 (1969)
- Figgie Hobbin: Poems for Children (1970)
- 'Quack!' Said the Billy-Goat (1970)
- The Tail of the Trinosaur (1972)
- As I Went Down Zig Zag (1974)
- When Dad Felt Bad. Little Nippers Series (1975)
- The Hill of the Fairy Calf (1976)
- Dick Whittington (1976)
- The Song of the Shapes (1977)
- Twenty-Four Hours (1977)
- The Animals' Carol (1978)
- The Gift of a Lamb (1985)
- Early in the Morning: A Collection of New Poems. Music by Anthony Castro. Illustrations by Michael Foreman (1986)
- Jack the Treacle Eater. illustrated by Charles Keeping (1987)
- The Young Man of Cury and Other Poems (1991)
- All Day Saturday, and Other Poems (1994)
- Collected Poems for Children. Illustrated by John Lawrence (1996)
- Collected Poems for Children. Illustrated by John Lawrence. 1996. Macmillan Children's Books. London: Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2000.
- Collected Poems for Children. Illustrated by John Lawrence. Afterword by Ted Hughes. Macmillan Children's Books. 1996. Foreword by Roger McGough. 2016. Macmillan Classics. London: Pan Macmillan, 2020.
- The Merrymaid of Zennor (1999)
- I Had a Little Cat (2009)
- Hands to Dance [aka "Hands to Dance and Skylark"] (1951)
- Runaway (1936)
- The Conquering Hero (1937)
- Benedict (1938)
- How Pleasant to Know Mrs. Lear: A Victorian Comedy in One Act (1948)
- The Ballad of Aucassin and Nicolette (1981)
- The Ballad of Aucassin and Nicolette: A Play in Three Acts. Kestrel Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
- The Burning Boy (c.1980s)
- Peninsula (1957)
- Dawn and Dusk (1964)
- Modern Folk Ballads (1966)
- Rising Early (1972)
- The Puffin Book of Magic Verse (1974)
- The Puffin Book of Magic Verse. Ed. Charles Causley. Illustrated by Barbara Swiderska. Puffin Books. London: Penguin, 1974.
- The Puffin Book of Salt-Sea Verse (1978)
- The Puffin Book of Salt-Sea Verse. Ed. Charles Causley. Illustrated by Antony Maitland. Kestrel Books. London: Penguin, 1978.
- The Batsford Book of Stories in Verse (1979)
- The Sun, Dancing: An Anthology of Christian Verse (1984)
- Twenty-Five Poems by Hamdija Demirovic: Translated with the Author from the Original Yugoslavian (1980)
- Schondilie (1982)
- Kings' Children: German folk ballads (1986)
Children's Books:
Fiction:
Plays & Libretti:
Edited:
Translated:
Vergissmeinnicht
Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.
The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.
Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.
We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.
But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move,
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.
For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.
Keith Douglas ... was an English poet and soldier noted for his war poetry ... and his wry memoir of the Western Desert campaign, Alamein to Zem Zem. He was killed in action during the invasion of Normandy.
Douglas ... won an open exhibition to Merton College, Oxford, in 1938 to read History and English. The First World War-veteran ... Edmund Blunden was his tutor at Merton, and regarded his poetic talent highly. Blunden sent his poems to T. S. Eliot, the doyen of English poetry, who found Douglas's verses 'impressive'. Douglas became the editor of Cherwell, and one of the poets anthologised in the collection Eight Oxford Poets (1941), although by the time that volume appeared he was already in the army. He does not seem to have been acquainted with somewhat junior but contemporary Oxford poets such as Sidney Keyes, Drummond Allison, John Heath-Stubbs and Philip Larkin ... At Oxford, he was good friends with the poet J. C. Hall who became his literary executor.
... After attending the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, he was commissioned on 1 February 1941 into the 2nd Derbyshire Yeomanry at Ripon. He was posted to the Middle East in July 1941 and transferred to the Nottinghamshire (Sherwood Rangers) Yeomanry. Posted initially at Cairo and Palestine, he found himself stuck at headquarters twenty miles behind El Alamein as a camouflage officer as the Second Battle of El Alamein began.
... Douglas took off against orders on 27 October, drove to the Regimental HQ in a truck and reported to the C.O., Colonel E. O. Kellett, lying that he had been instructed to go to the front ... Desperately needing officer replacements, the Colonel posted him to A Squadron, and gave him the opportunity to take part as a fighting tanker in the Eighth Army's victorious sweep through North Africa, vividly recounted in his memoir Alamein to Zem Zem ...
Douglas returned from North Africa to England in December 1943 and took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944. On 9 June Douglas's armoured unit was pinned down on high ground overlooking Tilly-sur-Seulles. Concerned by the lack of progress, Douglas dismounted his tank to undertake a personal reconnaissance during which he was killed by a German mortar. The regimental chaplain Captain Leslie Skinner buried him by a hedge, close to where he had died ... Shortly after the war his remains were reburied at Tilly-sur-Seulles War Cemetery.- Wikipedia: Keith Douglas
Keith Douglas can be a tough nut to crack. He's unmistakably the most talented of the three poets in our list who actually died during the war - Sidney Keyes and Alun Lewis are the others - which has given him great prominence in all discussions of Second World War Poetry. He even rivals Wilfred Owen in posthumous fame.
And yet, he has very little in common temperamentally with Owen, except for a certain fierceness of poetic attack. He seemed to positively relish war as a distraction from his own inner demons, the "beast on his back" portrayed by him in the picture below.
He doesn't sound much like the thirties poets; nor does he sound like a Modernist, exactly, though he probably has more in common with them than the MacSpaunday group. It's hard to forecast how he might have developed as a writer, as he seems - in the last of his collected poems, at any rate - fully formed as a writer.
"For you there is only the desert," as Anthony Quinn intones towards the end of Lawrence of Arabia. Douglas was by all accounts an extremely effective tank commander. His own account of the war in the desert is curiously deadpan and unrevealing, but there's a definite sense of inner torment in the poems he was composing at the same time.
I remember going to see a one-man play about Keith Douglas in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in the late 1980s while I was living there (mainly because my cousin Huw was doing the lighting for the show). It was a terrifyingly effective amalgam of prose and verse soliloquy. The Oxonian author-performer perhaps over-identified with the demoniacally driven Douglas, but it did highlight the ongoing power of his work.
He's not a docile, safe poet by any means, but it would be hard to see him as a negligible one.
-
Poetry:
- [with J. C. Hall & Norman Nicholson] Selected Poems (1943)
- Collected Poems (1951)
- Selected Poems (1964)
- The Complete Poems (1978)
- Complete Poems. Ed. Desmond Graham. 1978. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
- Alamein to Zem Zem (1946)
- Alamein to Zem Zem. 1966. Ed. Desmond Graham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
- The Letters of Keith Douglas. Ed. Desmond Graham (2000)
- Graham, Desmond. Keith Douglas, 1920–1944 (1974)
Prose:
Letters:
Secondary:
Alexandria
To the lucky now who have lovers or friends,
Who move to their sweet undiscovered ends,
Or whom the great conspiracy deceives,
I wish these whirling autumn leaves:
Promontories splashed by the salty sea,
Groaned on in darkness by the tram
To horizons of love or good luck or more love –
As for me I now move
Through many negatives to what I am.
Here at the last cold Pharos between Greece
And all I love, the lights confide
A deeper darkness to the rubbing tide;
Doors shut, and we the living are locked inside
Between the shadows and the thoughts of peace:
And so in furnished rooms revise
The index of our lovers and our friends
From gestures possibly forgotten, but the ends
Of longings like unconnected nerves,
And in this quiet rehearsal of their acts
We dream of them and cherish them as Facts.
Now when the sea grows restless as a conscript,
Excited by fresh wind, climbs the sea-wall,
I walk by it and think about you all:
B. with his respect for the Object, and D.
Searching in sex like a great pantry for jars
Marked ‘Plum and apple’; and the small, fell
Figure of Dorian ringing like a muffin-bell —
All indeed whom war or time threw up
On this littoral and tides could not move
Were objects for my study and my love.
And then turning where the last pale
Lighthouse, like a Samson blinded, stands
And turns its huge charred orbit on the sands
I think of you — indeed mostly of you,
In whom a writer would only name and lose
The dented boy’s lip and the close
Archer’s shoulders; but here to rediscover
By tides and faults of weather, by the rain
Which washes everything, the critic and the lover.
At the doors of Africa so many towns founded
Upon a parting could become Alexandria, like
The wife of Lot — a metaphor for tears;
And the queer student in his poky hot
Tenth floor room above the harbour hears
The sirens shaking the tree of his heart,
And shuts his books, while the most
Inexpressible longings like wounds unstitched
Stir in him some girl’s unquiet ghost.
So we, learning to suffer and not condemn
Can only wish you this great pure wind
Condemned by Greece, and turning like a helm
Inland where it smokes the fires of men,
Spins weathercocks on farms or catches
The lovers at their quarrel in the sheets;
Or like a walker in the darkness might,
Knocks and disturbs the artist at his papers
Up there alone, upon the alps of night.
Lawrence Durrell ... was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer ...
Born in India to British colonial parents, he was sent to England at the age of 11 for his education. He did not like formal education, and started writing poetry at the age of 15. His first book was published in 1935, when he was 23 years old. In March 1935 he and his mother and younger siblings moved to the island of Corfu.
... Durrell supported his writing by working for many years in the Foreign Service of the British government. His sojourns in various places during and after World War II (such as his time in Alexandria, Egypt) inspired much of his work. He married four times, and had a daughter with each of his first two wives.
During World War Two, Durrell served as a press attaché to the British embassies, first in Cairo and then Alexandria. While in Alexandria he met Eve (Yvette) Cohen ... a Jewish Alexandrian. She inspired his character Justine in The Alexandria Quartet ...
In May 1945, Durrell obtained a posting to Rhodes, the largest of the Dodecanese islands that Italy had taken over from the disintegrating Ottoman Empire in 1912 during the Balkan Wars. With the Italian surrender to the Allies in 1943, German forces took over most of the islands and held onto them as besieged fortresses until the war's end. Mainland Greece was at that time locked in civil war. A temporary British military government was established in the Dodecanese at war's end, pending sovereignty being transferred to Greece in 1947, as part of war reparations from Italy ... His book Reflections on a Marine Venus was inspired by this period and was a lyrical celebration of the island. It avoids more than a passing mention of [the war].- Wikipedia: Lawrence Durrell
I've written a fair amount about Lawrence Durrell already - his views on the ailment he refers to as "islomania", for instance:
a rare affliction of spirit. There are people who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are in a little world surrounded by sea fills them with an indescribable intoxication.Also, of course, the fabled Alexandria Quartet (1957-60).
His reputation as a poet is, perhaps, a little less secure. He did, however, in wartime Cairo, find a name for the local mixture of nagging cafard and inescapable history in the course of co-editing a magazine called Personal Landscape (8 issues, 1942-45). As Roger Bowen, the group's historian, has argued:
Cairo's "unreality" - the war in the Western Desert, cultural otherness and the varied definitions of exile, the layers of a native and an imperial history, the currents of political propaganda, literary rivalries played out far from the metropolitan center - formed the background to the growth of these ... distinct poetic voices, as well as the establishment of a magazine that promoted a modernist aesthetic and a canon that embraced contemporary Greek letters.It may not seem like a lot, but it is one of the very few significant literary movements to have been launched during the war. It's scarcely surprising that this was only possible on the extreme periphery of the action.
Despite all his valiant efforts to similarly mythologise Provence (in the Avignon Quintet, 1974-85), Crete (in Cefalu, 1947), or Istanbul (in The Revolt of Aphrodite, 1968-70), Durrell's name will be forever linked to Egypt - and, in particular, Alexandria. For better or worse, whether he expected it or not, professional expatriate though he was, Durrell has become the poet of British colonial decline.
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Poetry:
- Quaint Fragments: Poems Written between the Ages of Sixteen and Nineteen (1931)
- Ten Poems (1932)
- Transition: Poems (1934)
- A Private Country (1943)
- Cities, Plains and People (1946)
- On Seeming to Presume (1948)
- Collected Poems (1957)
- Collected Poems. 1957. Second Edition. London: Faber, 1968.
- The Poetry of Lawrence Durrell (1962)
- Selected Poems: 1953–1963. Ed. Alan Ross (1964)
- Selected Poems: 1953–1963. Ed. Alan Ross. 1964. London: Faber, 1965.
- The Ikons (1966)
- The Suchness of the Old Boy (1972)
- Collected Poems: 1931–1974. Ed. James A. Brigham (1980)
- Collected Poems: 1931–1974. Ed. James A. Brigham. London: Faber, 1980.
- Selected Poems of Lawrence Durrell. Ed. Peter Porter (2006)
- Pied Piper of Lovers (1935)
- Pied Piper of Lovers. 1935. Ed. James Gifford. Afterword by James A. Brigham. Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2008.
- [as ‘Charles Norden’]. Panic Spring: A Romance (1937)
- Panic Spring: A Romance. 1937. Ed. James Gifford. Introduction by Richard Pine. Afterword by James A. Brigham. Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2008.
- The Black Book: A Novel (1938)
- The Black Book: A Novel. 1938. Faber Paperbacks. London: Faber, 1977.
- Cefalu (1947)
- The Dark Labyrinth: A Novel. [‘Cefalu’, 1947]. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1964.
- White Eagles Over Serbia (1957)
- White Eagles Over Serbia. 1957. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1973.
- Justine (1957)
- Justine. 1957. The Alexandria Quartet, 1. London: Faber, 1964.
- Balthazar (1958)
- Balthazar. 1958. The Alexandria Quartet, 2. London: Faber, 1963.
- Mountolive (1958)
- Mountolive. 1958. The Alexandria Quartet, 3. London: Faber, 1963.
- Clea (1960)
- Clea. 1960. The Alexandria Quartet, 4. London: Faber, 1967.
- The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60)
- Justine (1957)
- Balthazar (1958)
- Mountolive (1958)
- Clea (1960)
- The Alexandria Quartet: Justine; Balthazar; Mountolive: Clea. 1957, 1958, 1958, 1960. London: Faber, 1962.
- The Alexandria Quartet: Justine; Balthazar; Mountolive; Clea. 1957, 1958, 1958, 1960, & 1962. Faber Paperbacks. London: Faber, 1983.
- Tunc: A Novel (1968)
- Tunc: A Novel. London: Faber, 1968.
- Nunquam: A Novel (1970)
- Nunquam: A Novel. 1970. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1971.
- The Revolt of Aphrodite (1968-70)
- Tunc (1968)
- Nunquam (1970)
- The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam. 1968, 1970. London: Faber, 1974.
- Monsieur: or, The Prince of Darkness (1974)
- Monsieur: or, The Prince of Darkness: A Novel. 1974. London: Faber, 1976.
- Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness. The Avignon Quintet, 1. 1974. London: Faber, 1986.
- Livia: or, Buried Alive (1978)
- Livia: or, Buried Alive: A Novel. London: Faber, 1978.
- Livia, or Buried Alive. The Avignon Quintet, 2. 1978. London: Faber, 1986.
- Constance: or, Solitary Practices (1982)
- Constance: or, Solitary Practices: A Novel. 1982. London: Faber, 1983.
- Constance, or Solitary Practices. The Avignon Quintet, 3. 1982. London: Faber, 1986.
- Sebastian: or, Ruling Passions (1983)
- Sebastian: or, Ruling Passions: A Novel. London: Faber, 1983.
- Sebastian, or Ruling Passions. The Avignon Quintet, 4. 1983. London: Faber, 1985.
- Quinx: or, The Ripper's Tale (1985)
- Quinx, or The Ripper’s Tale. 1985. London: Faber, 1986.
- Quinx, or The Ripper’s Tale. The Avignon Quintet, 5. 1985. London: Faber, 1986.
- The Avignon Quintet (1974-85)
- Monsieur: or, The Prince of Darkness (1974)
- Livia: or, Buried Alive (1978)
- Constance: or, Solitary Practices (1982)
- Sebastian: or, Ruling Passions (1983)
- Quinx: or, The Ripper's Tale (1985)
- The Avignon Quintet: Monsieur: or, The Prince of Darkness; Livia: or, Buried Alive; Constance: or, Solitary Practices; Sebastian: or, Ruling Passions; Quinx: or, The Ripper's Tale. 1974, 1978, 1982, 1983, 1985. London: Faber, 1992.
- Judith. 1962-66. Ed. Richard Pine (2012)
- Judith: A Novel. Ed. Richard Pine. New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2012.
- Esprit de Corps: Sketches from Diplomatic Life (1957)
- Esprit de Corps: Sketches from Diplomatic Life. Illustrated by V. H. Drummond. 1957. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1963.
- Stiff Upper Lip (1958)
- Stiff Upper Lip. Illustrated by Nicolas Bentley. 1958. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1966.
- Sauve Qui Peut (1966)
- Sauve Qui Peut. Illustrated by Nicolas Bentley. 1966. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1969.
- Antrobus Complete (1985)
- Antrobus Complete. Drawings by Marc. 1985. London: Faber, 1986.
- Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corcyra (1945)
- Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corcyra. 1945. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1973.
- Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes (1953)
- Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes. 1953. London: Faber, 1959.
- Bitter Lemons (1957)
- Bitter Lemons. 1957. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1959.
- Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel. Ed. Alan G. Thomas (1969)
- Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel. Ed. Alan G. Thomas. 1969. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1971.
- Spirit of Place: Letters & Essays on Travel. Ed. Alan G. Thomas. 1969. London: Faber, 1975.
- Blue Thirst (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1975)
- Sicilian Carousel (1977)
- Sicilian Carousel. 1977. London: Faber, 1978.
- The Greek Islands (1978)
- The Greek Islands. 1978. Faber Paperbacks. 1980. London: Faber, 1981.
- Caesar's Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence (1990)
- Caesar's Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence. Photographs by Harry Peccinotti. 1990. Faber Paperbacks. London: Faber, 1995.
- From the Elephant's Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings. Ed. James Gifford (2015)
- From the Elephant’s Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings. Ed. James Gifford. Foreword by Peter Baldwin. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: University of Alberta Press, 2015.
- A Key to Modern British Poetry (1952)
- Seignolle, Claude. The Accursed: Two Diabolical Tales. 1963. Trans. Bernard Wall. Foreword by Lawrence Durrell. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1967.
- The Plant Magic Man (1975)
- The Capra Chapbook Anthology: Henry Miller: On Turning Eighty (1972); Faye Kicknosway: O, You Can Walk on the Sky? Good (1972); Lawrence Durrell: The Plant Magic Man (1975); Ross Macdonald: On Crime Writing (1973) ; Ray Bradbury: Zen & the Art of Writing (1973); Victor Perera: The Loch Ness Monster Watchers (1973); Colin Wilson: Tree by Tolkien (1974); James D. Houston: Three Songs for My Father (1974); William F. Nolan: Hemingway: Last Days of the Lion (1974); Ursula Le Guin: Wild Angels (1975); Mark Vinz: Letters to the Poetry Editor (1975). Ed. Noel Young. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1979.
- A Smile in the Mind's Eye (1980)
- A Smile in the Mind's Eye. 1980. A Paladin Book. Frogmore, St. Albans, Herts.: Granada Publishing Limited, 1982.
- Lawrence Durrell's Endpapers and Inklings, 1933-1988. Volume One: Autobiographies, Fictions, Spirit of Place. Ed. Richard Pine. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019.
- Lawrence Durrell's Endpapers and Inklings, 1933-1988. Volume Two: Dramas, Screenplays, Essays, Incorrigibilia. Ed. Richard Pine. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019.
- [as 'Gaffer Peeslake']. Bromo Bombastes (1933)
- Sappho: A Play in Verse (1950)
- Sappho: A Play in Verse. 1950. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1967.
- An Irish Faustus: A Morality in Nine Scenes (1963)
- Acte (1964)
- Six Poems From the Greek of Sikelianós and Seféris (1946)
- George Seferis. The King of Asine and Other Poems. Trans. with Bernard Spencer & Nanos Valaoritis (1948)
- Emmanuel Royidis. The Curious History of Pope Joan (1954)
- Emmanuel Royidis. The Curious History of Pope Joan. 1866. Trans. Lawrence Durrell. 1954. Rev. ed. 1960. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1971.
- The Henry Miller Reader (1959)
- The Best of Henry Miller. 1959. Mercury Books. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1964.
- New Poems 1963: A P.E.N. Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (1963)
- Wordsworth: Selected by Lawrence Durrell (1973)
- Art & Outrage: A Correspondence About Henry Miller Between Alfred Perles and Lawrence Durrell (1959)
- Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller: A Private Correspondence. Ed. George Wickes (1962)
- Literary Lifelines: The Richard Aldington–Lawrence Durrell Correspondence (1981)
- Literary Lifelines: The Richard Aldington–Lawrence Durrell Correspondence. Ed. Ian S. MacNiven & Harry T. Moore. London: Faber, 1981.
- 'Letters to T. S. Eliot'. Twentieth Century Literature Vol. 33, No. 3 (1987): 348–358.
- The Durrell-Miller Letters: 1935–80 (1988)
- The Durrell-Miller Letters: 1935–80. Ed. Ian S. MacNiven. 1988. London: Faber / Michael Haag Ltd., 1989.
- Letters to Jean Fanchette. Ed. Jean Fanchette (1988)
- Durrell, Gerald. The Corfu Trilogy (1956-78)
- My Family and Other Animals. 1956. Penguin Book 1399. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.
- Birds, Beasts and Relatives. 1969. Fontana Books. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1970.
- The Garden of the Gods. 1978. Fontana Paperbacks. London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1980.
- Durrell, Gerald. Fillets of Plaice. 1971. Fontana Books. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1973.
- Durrell, Gerald. The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium. 1979. Fontana Paperbacks. London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1981.
- Fraser, G. S. Lawrence Durrell: A Study. With a Bibliography by Alan G. Thomas. London: Faber, 1968.
- [with Mark Alyn] The Big Supposer: A Dialogue. Illustrated by Lawrence Durrell. 1972. Trans. Francine Barker. London: Abelard-Schuman Limited, 1973.
- Bowker, Gordon. Through the Dark Labyrinth: A Biography of Lawrence Durrell: Fully Revised Edition. 1996. Pimlico. London: Random House, 1998.
- MacNiven, Ian S. Lawrence Durrell: A Biography. London: Faber, 1998.
Fiction:
Humour:
Travel:
Miscellaneous Prose:
Plays:
Translation:
Edited:
Letters:
Secondary:
When a Beau goes in
When a Beau goes in,
Into the drink,
It makes you think,
Because, you see, they always sink
But nobody says “Poor lad”
Or goes about looking sad
Because, you see, it’s war,
It’s the unalterable law.
Although it’s perfectly certain
The pilot’s gone for a Burton
And the observer too
It’s nothing to do with you
And if they both should go
To a land where falls no rain nor hail nor driven snow —
Here, there, or anywhere,
Do you suppose they care?
You shouldn’t cry
Or say a prayer or sigh.
In the cold sea, in the dark
It isn’t a lark
But it isn’t Original Sin —
It’s just a Beau going in.
Gavin Ewart was born in London ... [His] poetic journey began under the aegis of Geoffrey Grigson, with his work appearing in New Verse at seventeen. Early collections such as Phallus in Wonderland and Poems and Songs (1939) showcased his wit and lyrical deftness.
... The outbreak of World War II saw him serve as a Royal Artillery officer, a period which inevitably interrupted his poetic endeavours. Post-war, his career meandered through publishing and the British Council, culminating in his role as an advertising copywriter from 1952 onwards.
... it wasn’t until Londoners in 1964 that he published another volume. Nevertheless, he contributed the English lyrics for the “World Song” of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts during this hiatus.
The post-1964 period was prolific for Ewart ... The Collected Ewart: 1933–1980 (1980) and Collected Poems: 1980–1990 (1991) consolidated his oeuvre.
Ewart’s poetry, noted for its irreverent eroticism and sharp commentary on human behaviour, was both entertaining and thought-provoking. This very irreverence led to the banning of The Pleasures of the Flesh (1966) by W.H. Smith. His ... contribution to light verse earned him the Michael Braude Award in 1991.- Wikipedia: Gavin Ewart
I can't help feeling that Gavin Ewart is overdue for a bit of a revival. His relentless productivity in the last three decades of his life made his verse seem bland and ubiquitous, but now, thirty years after his death, that strange blend of facetiousness and guarded expressions of feeling has surely earned itself a place in the canon.
I've quoted elsewhere his fine poem "How Life Too is Sentimental" - about the near-death of his son from bronchial trouble in hospital:
Our daughter,
eighteen months old, was just tall enough
to look into his empty cot and say: ‘Baby gone!’
A situation, an action and a speech
so tear-jerking that Dickens might have thought of them –
and indeed, in life, when we say ‘It couldn’t happen!’
almost at once it happens. And the word ‘sentimental’
has come to mean exaggerated feeling.
It would have been hard to exaggerate our feelings then.
Ewart's work from all periods is worth rediscovering in the two fine collected volumes still available in second-hand shops. We need more poets as honest and fearless as that.
-
Poetry:
- Poems and Songs (1939)
- Londoners. Drawings by Colin Spencer (1964)
- Pleasures of the Flesh (1966)
- The Gavin Ewart Show (1971)
- No Fool like an Old Fool (1976)
- Or Where a Young Penguin Lies Screaming (1977)
- All My Little Ones (1978)
- The Collected Ewart: 1933–1980 (1980)
- The Collected Ewart, 1933-1980. 1980. London: Hutchinson, 1982.
- The Ewart Quarto (1984)
- The Gavin Ewart Show: Selected Poems 1939–1985 (1985)
- The Young Pobble's Guide to His Toes (1985)
- Late Pickings (1987)
- Penultimate Poems (1989)
- Collected Poems: 1980–1990 (1991)
- Collected Poems, 1980-1990. Hutchinson. London: Random Century Group Ltd., 1991.
- The Penguin Book of Light Verse (1980)
Edited:
The End of a Leave
Out of the damp black night,
The noise of locomotives,
A thousand whispering,
Sharp-nailed, sinewed, slight,
I meet that alien thing
Your hand, with all its motives.
Far from the roof of night
And iron these encounter;
In the gigantic hall
As the severing light
Menaces, human, small,
These hands exchange their counters.
Suddenly our relation
Is terrifyingly simple
Against wretched times,
Like a hand which mimes
Love in this anguished station
Against a whole world's pull.
Roy Broadbent Fuller ... was raised in Blackpool, Lancashire, and educated at Blackpool High School. Fuller was articled to a solicitor in 1928, in which year his first poem was published in the Sunday Referee. After qualifying as a solicitor in 1933, he worked for The Woolwich Equitable Building Society, ending his career as head of the legal department and a director. He served in the Royal Navy from 1941 to 1946.
Poems (1939) was his first book of poetry. He also began to write fiction, including crime novels, in the 1950s, and wrote several volumes of memoirs. As a poet he became identified, on stylistic grounds, with The Movement. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1968 to 1973.
He received a C.B.E. and Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1970 and the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 1980. From 1972 to 1979 he was a member of the Board of Governors of the BBC.- Wikipedia: Roy Fuller
Who was it who said that post-war British writing seemed to consist mainly of "biting off less than you can chew." Lawrence Durrell, perhaps? There were to be no more lofty attempts to encompass all of human experience in one book, like Joyce or Pound or Yeats. No, from now on literature was strictly confined to tales of adultery in provincial towns, or intimate accounts of the infighting in Council offices.
It's rather a cruel dictum, but when applied to the Movement writers - Amis, Fuller, Larkin, Wain - one does have to admit that there is a certain lack of expansiveness in their writing. And it's hard not to attribute at least part of that to their common experience of the war - not to mention its aftermath, the days of rationing and making-do that followed the Allied victory.
There was a sense in which the war itself came to be synonymous with the inflated ambitions of its central protagonists (and apologists). Auden wrote at the end of the thirties that: "the clever hopes expire / of a low, dishonest decade." Yeats (who died in 1939) felt guilty enough to ask himself: "Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?" Only horrible old Pound was left still shouting away in his weird fascist fantasy-land.
Fuller was typical of this new age of austerity. He wrote profusely and well - but he was always more preoccupied by the small, intimate questions than the big ones. Whether his work will continue to be read or not, it's hard to blame him for making that choice. The little questions are the big ones for most of us, after all. Long may it continue so, as our civilisation crumbles around us.
-
Poetry:
- Poems (1939)
- The Middle of a War (1942)
- A Lost Season (1944)
- Epitaphs and Occasions (1949)
- Counterparts (1954)
- Brutus’s Orchard (1957)
- Collected Poems (1962)
- Collected Poems 1936-1961. 1962. André Deutsch Paperback Poets. London: André Deutsch Limited, 1969.
- Buff (1965)
- New Poems (1968)
- Off Course: Poems (1969)
- Seen Grandpa Lately? (1972)
- Song Cycle from a Record Sleeve (1972)
- Tiny Tears (1973)
- From the Joke Shop (1975)
- The Joke Shop Annexe (1975)
- An Ill-Governed Coast: Poems (1976)
- Poor Roy (1977)
- The Reign of Sparrows (1980)
- More About Tompkins, and Other Light Verse (1981)
- House and Shop (1982)
- The Individual and his Times: A Selection of the Poetry of Roy Fuller. Ed. V. J. Lee (1982)
- [with Barbara Giles & Adrian Rumble] Upright Downfall (1983)
- As from the Thirties (1983)
- Mianserin Sonnets (1984)
- Subsequent to Summer (1985)
- New and Collected Poems, 1934-84 (1985)
- Outside the Canon (1986)
- Lessons of the Summer (1987)
- Consolations (1987)
- Available for Dreams (1989)
- The World Through the Window: Collected Poems for Children (1989)
- Selected Poems. Ed. John Fuller. Afterword by Neil Powell (2012)
- Savage Gold (1946)
- With My Little Eye (1948)
- The Second Curtain (1953)
- Fantasy and Fugue [aka "Murder in Mind", 1986] (1956)
- Image of a Society (1956)
- The Ruined Boys [aka "That Distant Afternoon"] (1959)
- The Father's Comedy (1961)
- The Perfect Fool (1963)
- My Child, My Sister (1965)
- Catspaw (1966)
- The Carnal Island (1970)
- Stares (1990)
- Byron for Today (1958)
- Owls and Artificers: Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1974)
- Professors and Gods: Last Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1975)
- Souvenirs (1980)
- Vamp Till Ready: Further Memoirs (1982)
- Home and Dry: Memoirs III (1984)
- Twelfth Night: A Personal View (1985)
- The Strange and the Good: Souvenirs; Vamp Till Ready; Home and Dry (1989)
- Spanner and Pen: Post-war Memoirs (1991)
- Fellow Mortals: An Anthology of Animal Verse (1981)
- Powell, Neil. Roy Fuller: Writer and Society (1996)
Fiction:
Non-fiction:
Edited:
Secondary:
War Poet
I am the man who looked for peace and found
My own eyes barbed,
I am the man who groped for words and found
An arrow in my hand.
I am the builder whose firm walls surround
A slipping land.
When I grow sick or mad
Mock me not nor chain me:
When I reach for the wind
Cast me not down:
Though my face is a burnt book
And a wasted town.
Sidney Keyes ... started writing poetry when still very young, with Wordsworth, Rilke and Jung among his main influences. He ... won a history scholarship to Queen's College, Oxford [in 1940]. While at college, Keyes wrote the only two books of his lifetime, The Cruel Solstice and The Iron Laurel. During his time in Oxford, Keyes fell in love with the young German artist Milein Cosman, but his love was not returned. He also befriended fellow poets John Heath-Stubbs and Michael Meyer, edited The Cherwell magazine, and formed a dramatic society ...
Keyes left Oxford and joined the British Army in April 1942, entering active service that same year. He was soon commissioned in the Queens Own Royal West Kent Regiment and served with his regiment's 1st Battalion, part of the 4th Division, to fight in the final stages of the Tunisian campaign in March 1943. Prior to his service, Keyes had already written more than half of the 110 poems that would later be gathered in The Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes. During combat, he was reported to have continued writing poetry. However, these works have not survived.
Keyes was killed in action on 29 April 1943, covering his platoon's retreat during a counter-attack, shortly before his 21st birthday. It has also been stated that he died at the hands of the enemy, following his capture.- Wikipedia: Sidney Keyes
What Sidney Keyes might have become is impossible to conjecture. One thing's for certain - he would have suppressed most of his youthful verse with a distinct shudder.
When I was a teenager, though, it all seemed fine to me. All those poems about the Dance of Death ("better plough-following / than this non-entity"), and scenes from the civil war ("the name of the day was WRATH") were exactly my cup of tea. But if you start reading him after you've been inoculated against grandiloquence by the stresses of adulthood, you're far less likely to offer him the time of day.
I remember even then that his poem about Dachau, foreseeing it as a place of future spiritual uplift, struck me as a bit glib. But he was young, and in love (unrequited), and there's just something so sad about all that silliness - and talent - and promise for the future - stopped with one bullet in an inconceivably small and unimportant action on the fringes of the Desert War.
Perhaps, in the long run, Philip Larkin was right about him, but Larkin was always a miserably jealous, self-pitying sod. He may have been - by far - the greater poet, but perhaps Keyes got a better cut of the cards even so. He didn't have to spend decades and decades wandering around the library stacks at Hull. Oblivion - or the Afterlife - was his portion, instead. Or were those two fates much the same?
-
Poetry:
- The Iron Laurel (1942)
- The Cruel Solstice (1943)
- The Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes. Ed. Michael Meyer (1945)
- The Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes. Ed. Michael Meyer. 1945. London: Routledge, 1946.
- The Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes. Ed. Michael Meyer. 1945. Rev. ed. London: Routledge, 1988.
- Minos of Crete: Plays and Stories. Ed. Michael Meyer (1948)
- Minos of Crete: Plays and Stories. With Selections from his Note Book and Letters and Some Early Unpublished Poems. Ed. Michael Meyer. London: Routledge, 1948.
- [with Michael Meyer] Eight Oxford Poets [Drummond Allison, Keith Douglas, John Heath-Stubbs, Sidney Keyes, Michael Meyer, Roy Porter, J. A. Shaw, Gordon Swaine] (1941)
- Guenther, John. Sidney Keyes: A Biographical Inquiry. LME, 11. London: London Magazine Editions, 1967.
Prose:
Edited:
Secondary:
All Day It Has Rained
All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors
Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,
Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground
And from the first grey wakening we have found
No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain
And the wind that made the canvas heave and flap
And the taut wet guy-ropes ravel out and snap.
All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream,
Drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream
Too light to stir the acorns that suddenly
Snatched from their cups by the wild south-westerly
Pattered against the tent and our upturned dreaming faces.
And we stretched out, unbuttoning our braces,
Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks,
Reading the Sunday papers – I saw a fox
And mentioned it in the note I scribbled home; –
And we talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome,
And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities
Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees;
As of ourselves or those whom we
For years have loved, and will again
Tomorrow maybe love; but now it is the rain
Possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain.
And I can remember nothing dearer or more to my heart
Than the children I watched in the woods on Saturday
Shaking down burning chestnuts for the schoolyard’s merry play,
Or the shaggy patient dog who followed me
By Sheet and Steep and up the wooded scree
To the Shoulder o’ Mutton where Edward Thomas brooded long
On death and beauty – till a bullet stopped his song.
Alun Lewis, was born ... at Cwmaman, near Aberdare in the Cynon Valley of the South Wales Coalfields. His parents, Thomas John and Gwladys Lewis, were school teachers at Llanwern; and he had a younger sister, Mair and two brothers. By the time he won a scholarship to attend Cowbridge Grammar School, he was already interested in writing. He went on to study at Aberystwyth University and the University of Manchester. Although he was born in South Wales, he wrote in English only.
... After the outbreak of the Second World War Lewis first joined the British Army's Royal Engineers as a Private because he was a pacifist, but still wanted to fight fascism. However, he then inexplicably sought and gained a commission in an infantry battalion. In 1941 he collaborated with artists John Petts and Brenda Chamberlain on the "Caseg broadsheets". His first published book was the poetry collection Raider's Dawn and other poems (1942), which was followed by a volume of short stories, The Last Inspection (1942). In 1942 he was sent to India with the 6th battalion South Wales Borderers.
... Lewis died on 5 March 1944 during the Burma campaign against the Imperial Japanese Army. He was found shot in the head, after shaving and washing, near the officers' latrines, with his revolver in his hand, and died from his wound six hours later. Despite it being a case of suicide, a court of inquiry charitably concluded that he had tripped and that the shooting was an accident. He is buried at Taukkyan War Cemetery.
His second book of poems, Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets. Poems in Transit, was published in 1945, and his Letters from India in 1946.- Wikipedia: Alun Lewis
Alun Lewis is an even sadder case than Keyes or Douglas. All that talent - possibly more in his prose than in his poetry - all that originality ... He was a little too fascinated by death, unfortunately.
It's hard to believe that his suicide was more than a momentary impulse: brought on as much by mud, rain and dysentery as by any deep existential crisis. In any case, it happened.
Would he have thrived in the post-war world? Possibly not. But he struck a unique note: his short stories, in particular, didn't sound at all like anybody else's. I suspect that he might have developed into more of a George Orwell than a Dylan Thomas. In any case, we'll never know. We're left with some very fine poems and prose pieces, together with a good deal of lesser work.
I think it's pretty obvious by now that he won't be forgotten.
-
Poetry:
- Raiders' Dawn and other poems (1942)
- Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets. Poems in Transit (1945)
- Selected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Ian Hamilton (1966)
- Selected Poetry and Prose. Biographical Introduction by Ian Hamilton. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1966.
- Selected Poems of Alun Lewis. Ed. Jeremy Hooker & Gweno Lewis (1981)
- Alun Lewis. A Miscellany of His Writings. Ed. John Pikoulis (1982)
- Collected Poems. Ed. Cary Archard (1994)
- The Last Inspection and other stories (1942)
- In the Green Tree: Letters & Stories (1948)
- Collected Stories. Ed. Cary Archard (1990)
- Letters from India. Ed. Gweno Lewis & Gwyn Jones (1946)
- Letters to My Wife. Ed. Gweno Lewis (1989)
- A Cypress Walk: Letters to 'Frieda', with a memoir by Freda Aykroyd (2006)
- Pikoulis, John. Alun Lewis: A Life (1984)
Prose:
Letters:
Secondary:
Missing
Less said the better.
The bill unpaid, the dead letter.
No roses at the end
Of Smith, my friend.
Last words don't matter,
And there are none to flatter.
Words will not fill the post
Of Smith, the ghost.
For Smith, our brother,
only son of a loving mother,
The ocean lifted, stirred,
Leaving no word.
John Pudney was a British poet, journalist and author. He was known especially for his popular poetry written during the Second World War, but he also wrote novels, short stories and children's fiction. His broad-ranging non-fiction, often commissioned, served as his primary source of income.
On 30 October 1934, Pudney married the Fabian feminist Crystal Selwyn Herbert (1915–1999), the daughter of A. P. Herbert ... They first lived in Cornwall in a converted lifeboat, then took a farm in Essex. There were two daughters and a son. They divorced in 1955, and Pudney immediately married his second wife, Monica Forbes Curtis of the Forbes family. She helped him recover from his alcoholism, to which he publicly confessed in 1965 and emerged cured in 1967 – despite a hit-and-run accident in the middle that broke both his legs and dislocated his shoulder. The recovery process became a subject for his writing ... In 1976, Pudney developed cancer of the throat from which he died nearly two years later in much pain. He wrote about his illness unflinchingly in his autobiographical Thank Goodness for Cake, posthumously published in 1978.- Wikipedia: John Pudney
I wrote a post about John Pudney a few years ago, à propos of his set of children's adventure stories named after the days of the week (and, when he ran out of days, the seasons of the year). I'd read them with great enjoyment as a boy, but found that most of the old magic had departed when I tried one of them as a grownup.
My post continued as follows:
Though I didn't realise it at the time, John Pudney was a far more versatile and interesting figure than he seemed. As a slightly younger contemporary of W. H. Auden, he'd published a number of books on the fringes of the Macspaunday group in the thirties before finding his true audience in the forties as a war poet.These are two of the most famous poems of the Second World War. The fact that they were included in a popular film meant that they reached an unusually wide audience, few of whom probably knew who'd actually written them.
The Way to the Stars, pictured above, is famous for containing two poems by Pudney which are implied, in context, to have been written by Michael Redgrave's character in the movie: "Missing" and "Johnny-head-in-air." The latter, in particular, became a kind of R.A.F. anthem:Do not despair For Johnny-head-in-air; He sleeps as sound As Johnny underground. Fetch out no shroud For Johnny-in-the-cloud; And keep your tears For him in after years. Better by far For Johnny-the-bright-star, To keep your head And see his children fed.
Along with his colleague and contemporary Henry Treece, with whom he edited the anthology Air Force Poetry (1944), he would have to be seen as one of the most successful of the British war poets. His subsequent work - the long struggle with alcoholism chronicled in his second volume of selected poems, for instance, also merits rediscovery.
-
Poetry:
- Spring Encounter (1933)
- Open the Sky (1934)
- Dispersal Point and other Air Poems (1942)
- The Grass Grew All Round (1942)
- Beyond This Disregard (1943)
- South of Forty (1943)
- Ten Summers: Poems 1933–1943 (1944)
- Almanack of Hope: Sonnets (1944)
- Flight above Cloud (1944)
- World Still There (1945)
- Selected Poems (1946)
- Low Life (1947)
- Commemorations (1948)
- Sixpenny Songs (1953)
- Collected Poems (1957)
- The Trampoline (1959)
- Spill Out: Poems and Ballads (1967)
- Spandrels: Poems and Ballads (1969)
- Take This Orange: Poems and Ballads (1971)
- Selected Poems 1967–1973 (1973)
- Living in a One-Sided House (1976)
- Jacobson's Ladder (1938)
- Estuary: A Romance (1947)
- Shuffley Wanderers (1948)
- The Accomplice (1950)
- Hero of a Summer's Day (1951)
- The Net (1952)
- A Ring for Luck (1953)
- Trespass in the Sun (1957)
- Thin Air (1961)
- Tunnel to the Sky (1965)
- The Long Time Growing Up (1971)
- And Lastly the Fireworks (1935)
- Uncle Arthur and Other Stories (1939)
- Edna's Fruit Hat (1946)
- It Breathed Down My Neck: Selected Stories (1946)
- The Europeans: Fourteen tales of a Continent (1948)
- Saturday Adventure (1950)
- Sunday Adventure (1951)
- Monday Adventure: The Secrets of Blackmead Abbey (1952)
- Tuesday Adventure: The Affray in the Sardanger Fjord (1953)
- Wednesday Adventure (1954)
- Thursday Adventure: The Stolen Airliner (1955)
- Friday Adventure (1956)
- The Grandfather Clock (1957)
- Crossing the Road (1958)
- Spring Adventure (1961)
- Summer Adventure (1962)
- The Hartwarp Light Railway (1962)
- The Hartwarp Balloon (1963)
- The Hartwarp Circus (1963)
- The Hartwarp Bakehouse (1964)
- Autumn Adventure (1964)
- The Hartwarp Explosion (1965)
- Winter Adventure (1965)
- The Hartwarp Jets (1967)
- The Green Grass Grew All Round (1942)
- Who Only England Know (1943)
- Home & Away – An Autobiographical Gambit (1960)
- Thank Goodness for Cake (1978)
- The Air Battle of Malta [HMSO Information Books] (1944)
- Atlantic Bridge [HMSO Information Books] (1945
- World Still There (1945)
- Laboratory of the Air: The Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough [HMSO] (1948)
- Music on the South Bank: An Appreciation of The Royal Festival Hall (1951)
- His Majesty King George VI (1952)
- The Thomas Cook Story (1953)
- The Queen's People. Photographs by Izis Bidermanas (1953)
- The Smallest Room: A Discreet Survey Through the Ages (1954)
- Six Great Aviators (1955)
- The Leisure-Hour Companion (1959)
- The Seven Skies: A History of B.O.A.C. (1959)
- A Pride of Unicorns: Richard and David Atcherley of the R.A.F. (1960)
- Bristol Fashion. Some Account of the Earlier Days of Bristol Aviation (1960)
- The Camel Fighter (1964)
- The Golden Age of Steam (1967)
- Suez: De Lesseps' Canal (1968)
- A Draught of Contentment. The Story of the Courage Group (1971)
- Crossing London's River: the Bridges, Ferries and Tunnels Crossing the Thames Tideway in London (1972)
- Brunel and His World (1974)
- London's Docks (1975)
- Lewis Carroll and His World (1976)
- John Wesley and His World (1978)
- [with Henry Treece] Air Force Poetry (1944)
- The Pick of Today's Short Stories. 14 vols (1949–1963)
- The Book of Leisure (1957)
- [with Norman Hidden & Michael Johnson] Writers' Workshop: Poetry Anthology (1967- )
- Flight and Flying (1968)
Novels:
Short stories:
Children's Books:
Autobiographical:
Non-fiction:
Edited:
Naming of Parts
Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.
This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.
This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.
And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.
They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For today we have naming of parts.
Henry Reed ... was a British poet, translator, radio dramatist, and journalist.
Reed was born in Birmingham and educated at King Edward VI School ... followed by the University of Birmingham. At university he associated with W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Walter Allen ... He was called up to the Army in 1941, spending most of the war as a Japanese translator.
... After the war he worked for the BBC as a radio broadcaster, translator and playwright ...
Reed's most famous poetry is in Lessons of the War, originally three poems which are witty parodies of British army basic training during World War II, which suffered from a lack of equipment at that time. Originally published in New Statesman and Nation (August 1942), the series was later published in A Map of Verona in 1946, ... his only collection published in his lifetime ... Three further poems have subsequently been added to the set. Another often-anthologised poem is "Chard Whitlow: Mr. Eliot's Sunday Evening Postscript", a satire of T. S. Eliot's Burnt Norton. Eliot himself was amused by "Chard Whitlow"'s mournful imitations of his poetic style ("As we get older we do not get any younger ...").- Wikipedia: Henry Reed
It's easy to get a bit sick of "The Naming of Parts." It always comes up whenever Second World War poetry is discussed, and yet it's a pretty obvious idea when you think about it - a bit like Sassoon's "Brother Lead and Sister Steel".
Besides that, there's his Eliot parody "Chard Whitlow". That's quite amusing, too. All in all, he sounds like he was rather a unfulfilled and dissatisfied character. His radio plays seem to have been the things that pleased him most amongst his collected works.
However, his one memorable war poem will certainly not be forgotten. And now that his Collected Poems have freceived the full Jon Stallworthy treatment, it's safe to predict that they will find an honorable place in all good war libraries, too.
-
Poetry:
- A Map of Verona (1946)
- Giacomo Leopardi: "Chorus of the Dead", broadcast by BBC radio on February 6, 1949. The Listener (April 28, 1949)
- Giacomo Leopardi: "The Infinite", broadcast by BBC radio on January 12, 1975. The Listener (June 1, 1950)
- Collected Poems. Ed. Jon Stallworthy (1991)
- Paride Rombi: Perdu and his Father (1954)
- Three Plays by Ugo Betti ["The Queen and the Rebels", "The Burnt Flower-Bed", "Summertime"] (1958)
- Ugo Betti: Crime on Goat Island (1960)
- Honoré de Balzac: Père Goriot (1962)
- Dino Buzzati: Larger than Life (1962)
- Ugo Betti: Corruption in the Palace of Justice (staged 1963)
- Honoré de Balzac: Eugénie Grandet (1964)
- Natalia Ginzburg: The Advertisement (staged 1969)
Translations:
U 244
Anticipating our zigzag, as if somehow
By information or low
Cunning, she knew our speed
And course, she contrived a need
For company. She came at us
From all angles, silently, without fuss,
A whine on the asdic, homing in.
We readied depth charges, prepared
Our tin fish. She moved away,
Out of the sea’s swing and sway,
As if hurt, a rebuffed lover,
Whose hide-and-seek was over.
We never fired, nor she either,
Her hull like wet liquorice slipping
Fathoms below us, her bleeping
A reminder like the weather
Of death’s attention. In dreams
Her name haunts me sometimes.
‘You, too,’ a familiar that rhymes
With everything, except what it seems.
Alan Ross ... was a British poet, writer, editor and publisher
Ross was born in Calcutta, India ... When, aged seven, he was sent to be educated in Falmouth, England, he spoke better Hindustani than English. Following preparatory school, he boarded at Haileybury where, being both small for his age and a latecomer to his year, he initially suffered greatly from bullying ... but his stock quickly rose when he revealed a talent which matched his passion for cricket ...
In 1940 he went to read Modern Languages at St John's College, Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. Ross represented the university at both cricket and squash but did not complete his studies after joining the Royal Navy in 1941 ...
During his first two years in the Royal Navy, Ross served on several destroyers escorting supply ships to the Soviet Union. On 30 December 1942 he was almost killed whilst serving aboard HMS Onslow (G17), the leading destroyer in a convoy assigned to fend off a strong flotilla of German capital ships intent on annihilating the arctic convoy JW 51B, at the Battle of the Barents Sea.
After he was demobilised in 1946 Ross decided not to resume his studies at Oxford, but instead to try his hand at journalism. In 1946 his first poetry collection The Derelict Day was published; it contained poems he had written whilst in the Navy. The following year the publisher John Lehmann funded him and the artist John Minton to travel to Corsica to produce the travel book Time Was Away.
Ross became a sports writer for The Observer in 1950, and became the paper's cricket correspondent in 1953, the same year his son was born. Throughout the 1950s he was a regular contributor to Lehmann's The London Magazine, before taking over as the title's editor in 1961. He edited the monthly magazine under the trimmed title London Magazine until his death; during this period it was transformed from an academic literary review to a far more cutting-edge review of the arts.
Ross came to prominence as a poet with poems inspired by his experience during the Second World War. He was one of the few poets who wrote poems in English about naval warfare during that war.- Wikipedia: Alan Ross
I wish I knew more about him, really. Judging from the poem above, he had a fine and subtle way with words. His work on the London Magazine had its reverberations even as far away as New Zealand, according to some of my older poet friends.
The Cricket expertise sounds profoundly English, and thus unjudgeable by anyone outside that strange family circle. I'd like to read more of his work - and not just because we share a surname. "Ross" is as common a name as "Smith" in certain parts of the Scottish highlands, so to call a man John Ross is really just to call him a man.
-
Poetry:
- The Derelict Day: Poems in Germany (1947)
- Something of the Sea (1954)
- To Whom It May Concern (1958)
- African Negatives (1962)
- North from Sicily: Poems in Italy 1961–64 (1965)
- Poems 1942–67 (1967)
- Tropical Ice (1972)
- The Taj Express: Poems 1967–73 (1973)
- Open Sea (1975)
- Death Valley and other Poems in America (1980)
- After Pusan (1995)
- Poems (2005)
- Poems. Ed. Paul Vansittart [Greville Press Pamphlets] (2005)
- Time Was Away: a Notebook in Corsica (1948)
- The Gulf of Pleasure (1951)
- The Bandit on the Billiard Table; a Journey through Sardinia (1954)
- Winter Sea: War, Journeys, Writers (1997)
- Reflections on Blue Water: Journeys in the Gulf of Naples and in the Aeolian Islands (1999)
- Blindfold Games (1986)
- Coastwise Lights (1988)
- The Onion Man. Illustrated by Raymond Briggs (1959)
- Danger on Glass Island. Illustrated by Raymond Briggs (1960)
- The Wreck of Moni. Illustrated by Raymond Briggs (1965)
- A Castle in Sicily. Illustrated by Toni Patten (1966)
- Australia 55: A Journal of the M.C.C. Tour (1955)
- Cape Summer and the Australians in England (1957)
- Through the Caribbean: England in the West Indies, 1960 (1960)
- Australia 63 (1963)
- Ranji: Prince of Cricketers (1983)
- [with Patrick Eagar] An Australian Summer: The Recovery of the Ashes 1985 (1985)
- Green Fading into Blue: Writings on Cricket and other Sports (1999)
- The Cricketer's Companion [aka "Kingswood Book of Cricket", 1979] (1960)
- Crusoe on Cricket: the Cricket Writings of R. C. Robertson-Glasgow (1966)
- Keith Vaughan: Journals 1939-1977 (1989)
Travel Books:
Autobiography:
Children's Books:
Cricket:
Edited:
The Bay 1942
Across your deadwater
distant is not so far.
Ferry that shallow flat;
one shore beyond makes clear
a prospect, simple nature
not tricked out, just right.
Upharbour I watch step
by step advance a prim taut ship
from anti-sub patrol.
One century gone each island
agrees what is meant by fear
is more than agitating
of tired nerves. A cruder
cause lies north. I stand
as other men, debating
what has outrun argument.
Violent in his ascendant
Mars, climbing, mocks a fool.
We pay for folly now
in small arms’ ignominy,
where few find their vocation
sweat out our stint of duty.
The latest highlands glow
in detail; slow, expressing
no regret for your condition,
they yield, a murky easing
in time we cannot kill.
Kendrick Smithyman ... was born in Te Kōpuru, a milling and logging town on the Wairoa River near Dargaville, in the Northland Region in the far north of New Zealand ...
In World War II, Smithyman served in the New Zealand Army artillery as bombardier (1941–1942), then as a quartermaster in the Royal New Zealand Air Force from 1942 to 1945. His service in the armed services was spent in New Zealand except for a short period in 1945 when he was stationed on Norfolk Island, resulting in Considerations, a sequence of poems later published in Landfall and after that in the 1951 edition of Allen Curnow's Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–1950.
By 1944, his poetry started appearing regularly in journals in New Zealand, Australia, Britain and the United States, quickly establishing his reputation in New Zealand as one of the leading poets of the nation's post-war generation ...
[In] the early 1960s he spent less effort on poetry and more on literary criticism, notably A Way of Saying: A Study of New Zealand Poetry (1965). The book's description of the aesthetics and practice of Auckland poets, whose work he dubbed "academic" (including M. K. Joseph, Keith Sinclair, Mary Stanley, C. K. Stead, and the later work of Allen Curnow), also provided insights into his own outlook and poems ...
Smithyman was promoted to senior tutor at the University of Auckland in 1966, and he held the post until 1987.
In 1986 he was awarded an honorary LittD by the University of Auckland, and he won the New Zealand Book Awards for poetry for Stories About Wooden Keyboards (1985). The poems in that volume were more accessible to the general reader than his previous books and tended to use more narrative, anecdote and comedy. This vein in his poetry continued with Are You Going to the Pictures? (1987) and Auto/biographies (1992) ...
Smithyman's other writing in his final years included essays on New Zealand philology and critical editions of novels by William Satchell and the stories of Greville Texidor ... He died in December 1995[1] at North Shore Hospital in Auckland, after falling ill at his home in Northcote.- Wikipedia: Kendrick Smithyman
"I knew him, Horatio." And, yes, he was a "fellow of infinite jest" - or rather, infinite anecdotes: many of them incomprehensible to those without an encyclopedic knowledge of the early history of New Zealand. I wouldn't say I knew him well - that would be too strong a boast. He was Head Tutor in the Auckland University English Department while I was teaching there in 1986. We spoke a few times, and I think he knew how much I respected his work.
Later, when I returned to New Zealand in 1990, I made a point of going to visit him in Northcote, where he continued to live after his retirement. He and his wife Margaret Edgcumbe made us very welcome, and I tried to learn as much from him as I could.
After he died, I was allowed to look through his papers, and was privileged to edit his late collection of translations from the Italian. He's one of my touchstone writers, and - in my opinion, at least - one of New Zealand's finest and most original poets.
As for his war experience, it was way before my time. He did talk about it a bit. I remember there was one long, very circumstantial anecdote about Kendrick and some others creeping up to a farm where an armed offender was rumoured to be hiding out. As they approached, the smell got worse and worse, and they feared the worst: a dead body, perhaps ... Instead - reveal! - it was an old animal carcase hanging in the outhouse. That was the kind of instant bathos he specialised in.
There are quite a lot of poems from that era included in his collected works. If you're curious, you can find them all online here.
-
Poetry Books:
- The Blind Mountain and Other Poems (1950)
- The Blind Mountain and Other Poems. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1950.
- Inheritance (1962)
- Inheritance. Hamilton & Auckland: Paul’s Book Arcade, 1962
- Flying to Palmerston (1968)
- Flying to Palmerston. Christchurch: Auckland University & Oxford University Press, 1968.
- Earthquake Weather (1972)
- Earthquake Weather. Auckland: Auckland University Press & Oxford University Press, 1972.
- The Seal in the Dolphin Pool (1974)
- The Seal in the Dolphin Pool. Auckland: Auckland University Press & Oxford University Press, 1974.
- Dwarf with a Billiard Cue (1978)
- Dwarf with a Billiard Cue. Auckland: Auckland University Press & Oxford University Press, 1978.
- Stories About Wooden Keyboards (1985)
- Stories About Wooden Keyboards. Auckland: Auckland University Press & Oxford University Press, 1985.
- Are You Going to the Pictures? (1987)
- Are You Going to the Pictures? Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1987.
- Selected Poems. Ed. Peter Simpson (1989)
- Selected Poems. Ed. Peter Simpson. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1989.
- Auto/Biographies (1992)
- Auto/Biographies. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1992.
- Atua Wera (1997)
- Atua Wera. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1997.
- Imperial Vistas Family Fictions (2002)
- Imperial Vistas Family Fictions. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002.
- Last Poems. Ed. Peter Simpson (2002)
- Last Poems. Ed. Peter Simpson. Auckland: Holloway Press, 2002.
- Collected Poems, 1943-1995. Ed. Margaret Edgcumbe & Peter Simpson (2004)
- Collected Poems, 1943-1995. Ed. Margaret Edgcumbe and Peter Simpson. Auckland: Mudflat Webworks, 2004.
- Collected Poems I: 1943-50. (209 poems)
- Collected Poems II: 1951-55. (108 poems)
- Collected Poems III: 1956-60. (107 poems) & Collected Poems IV: 1965-69. (58 poems)
- Collected Poems V: Journal 69. (92 poems)
- Collected Poems VI: 1970-79. (135 poems)
- Collected Poems VIIa: 1980-84. (63 poems)
- Collected Poems VIIb: Festives People Places Pictures Book. October 1981-October 1982. (80 poems)
- Collected Poems VIII: Imperial Vistas/Family Fictions. 1983-1984. (129 poems)
- Collected Poems IX: 1985-87. (89 Poems)
- Collected Poems X: 1988-89. (95 poems) & Collected Poems XI: 1990-95. (37 poems)
- Versions from Italian (Quasimodo / Campana to Montale). 1993. (134 & 83 poems)
- Collected Poems, 1943-1995. Ed. Margaret Edgcumbe and Peter Simpson. Auckland: Mudflat Webworks, 2004.
- Private Bestiary: Selected Unpublished Poems, 1944-1993. Ed. Scott Hamilton (2010)
- Private Bestiary: Selected Unpublished Poems, 1944-1993. Ed. Scott Hamilton. Auckland: Titus Books, 2010.
- Seven Sonnets (1946)
- Seven Sonnets. Auckland: Pelorus Press, 1946.
- The Gay Trapeze (1955)
- The Gay Trapeze. Poems in Pamphlet 4. Wellington: Handcraft Press, 1955.
- [with others] The Night Shift: Poems on Aspects of Love (1957)
- [with James K. Baxter, Charles Doyle, & Louis Johnson] The Night Shift: Poems on Aspects of Love. Wellington: Capricorn Press, 1957.
- Menu, Departmental Dinner in Honour of Professor S. Musgrove and Professor M.K. Joseph, the Senior Common Room, 30 November 1979. [Poetry by W.K. Smithyman]. Auckland: Department of English, University of Auckland (1979)
- Centennial Poets, Auckland: Printed for the Centenary Celebrations by the Mt Pleasant Press, University of Auckland: Poems by Kendrick Smithyman, Riemke Ensing, Terry Locke, Mervyn Thompson, Wystan Curnow, Peter Dane (1983)
- An Informal Occasion in the English Department for Peter Dane, Bill Pearson, Karl Stead, 5 December 1986: Three Poems. Auckland: Department of English, University of Auckland (1986)
- Tomarata. Afterword by Peter Simpson (1996)
- Tomarata. Afterword by Peter Simpson. Tamaki: Holloway Press, 1996.
- A Way of Saying: A Study of New Zealand Poetry (1965)
- A Way of Saying: A Study of New Zealand Poetry. Auckland & London: Collins, 1965
- Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian (2004)
- Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian. Ed. Jack Ross. Auckland: The Writers Group, 2004.
- Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian. 2004. Ed. Jack Ross & Marco Sonzogni. Transference Series. Novi Ligure: Edizioni Joker, 2010.
- William Satchell: The Land of the Lost (1971)
- William Satchell. The Land of the Lost. 1902. Ed. Kendrick Smithyman. New Zealand Fiction. Ed. J. C. Reid. Auckland: Auckland University Press & Oxford University Press, 1971.
- William Satchell: The Toll of the Bush (1985)
- William Satchell. The Toll of the Bush. 1905. Ed. Kendrick Smithyman. New Zealand Fiction. Ed. Bill Pearson. Auckland: Auckland University Press & Oxford University Press, 1985.
- [with C. K. Stead & Elizabeth Smither] The New Gramophone Room: Poetry & Fiction (1985)
- The New Gramophone Room: Poetry & Fiction. Selected by C. K. Stead, Elizabeth Smither & Kendrick Smithyman. Auckland: Department of English, University of Auckland, 1985.
- Greville Texidor: In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot: Selected Fiction (1987)
- Greville Texidor. In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot: Selected Fiction. Ed. Kendrick Smithyman. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1987.
- Mary Stanley: Starveling Year and other poems (1994)
- Mary Stanley. Starveling Year and other poems. 1953. Ed. Kendrick Smithyman. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1994.
- Three Poems for Kendrick Smithyman (1987)
- Three Poems for Kendrick Smithyman: Murray Edmond, Keith Sinclair & C. K. Stead. Auckland: Department of English / Auckland University Press, 20 November 1987.
Poetry Chapbooks:
Prose:
Translation:
Edited:
Secondary:
Lincolnshire Bomber Station
Across the road the homesick Romans made
The ground-mist thickens to a milky shroud;
Through flat, damp fields call sheep, mourning their dead
In cracked and timeless voices, unutterably sad,
Suffering for all the world, in Lincolnshire.
And I wonder how the Romans liked it here;
Flat fields, no sun, the muddy misty dawn,
And always, above all, the mad rain dripping down,
Rusting sword and helmet, wetting the feet
And soaking to the bone, down to the very heart ...
Henry Treece ... was a British poet and writer who also worked as a teacher and editor. He wrote a range of works but is mostly remembered as a writer of children's historical novels.
... He published five volumes of poetry [between 1940 and 1952] ... He appeared in the 1949 The New British Poets: an anthology edited by Kenneth Rexroth; but from 1952 with The Dark Island he devoted himself to fiction. His best known are his juvenile historical novels, particularly those set in the Viking Age, although he also wrote some adult historical novels.
In World War II he served as an intelligence officer in the RAF and helped John Pudney edit Air Force Poetry.
Other poetry anthologies he was involved with include The New Apocalypse (1939) with J. F. Hendry - giving its name to the New Apocalyptics movement; two further anthologies with Hendry followed. He wrote a critical study of Dylan Thomas, called Dylan Thomas – Dog among the fairies ... in 1949. He and Thomas became estranged over Thomas's refusal to sign up as a New Apocalyptic.
... He edited issues of the magazines Transformation, and A New Romantic Anthology (1949) with Stefan Schimanski, issues of Kingdom Come: The Magazine of War-Time Oxford with Schimanski and Alan Rook, as well as War-Time Harvest. How I See Apocalypse (1946) was a retrospective statement. Treece died from a heart attack in 1966.- Wikipedia: Henry Treece
I fully intended to include Henry Treece in a series of posts I was writing on my Favourite Children's Authors. I suppose that I failed to do so mainly because his work - even in the rather circumscribed genre described above as "juvenile historical novels" - is so violent and so odd.
It's hard to say just how serious he was about the "New Apocalyptics" movement: very serious, I suspect. Its demise left him somewhat rudderless, but he made up for it with some terrifyingly dark historical novels about Ancient Britain and Greek mythology. Those that I've read are a feast of barbaric sacrifices and pagan rampage in general. Great stuff - if you like that sort of thing. At the time I think I did, though perhaps not so much anymore.
The kid's books are a bit saner. The Viking trilogy are the ones I enjoyed most.
All in all, it's hard to know what to make of him. I suppose in many ways he's a forgotten man - but he has his place in the history of World War Two poetry. More to the point, his children's books have outlasted him and will probably continue to do so. I look forward to reading the rest of his novels at some point. I suspect that they've never quite received the attention they deserve.
-
Poetry:
- 38 Poems (1940)
- Invitation and Warning (1942)
- The Black Seasons (1945)
- Collected Poems (1946)
- The Haunted Garden (1947)
- The Exiles (1952)
- Carnival King: A Verse Play in Three Acts (1955)
- I Cannot go Hunting Tomorrow: Short Stories (1946)
- The Dark Island [USA: The Savage Warriors] (1952)
- The Dark Island. 1952. Celtic Tetralogy, 2. Illustrated by James Cawthorn. Introduction by Michael Moorcock. Manchester: Savoy Books Ltd., 1980.
- The Rebels (1953)
- The Golden Strangers [USA: The Invaders] (1956)
- The Golden Strangers. 1956. Celtic Tetralogy, 1. Illustrated by James Cawthorn. Introduction by Michael Moorcock. Manchester: Savoy Books Ltd., 1980.
- The Great Captains (1956)
- The Great Captains. 1956. Celtic Tetralogy, 4. Illustrated by James Cawthorn. Introduction by Michael Moorcock. Manchester: Savoy Books Ltd., 1980.
- Red Queen, White Queen [USA: The Pagan Queen] (1958)
- Red Queen, White Queen. 1958. Celtic Tetralogy, 3. Illustrated by James Cawthorn. Introduction by Michael Moorcock. Manchester: Savoy Books Ltd., 1980.
- Ride into Danger (1959)
- The Master of Badger's Hall (1959)
- A Fighting Man (1960)
- The Jet Beads (1961)
- Jason (1961)
- Jason. 1961. Paperback Library. New York: Coronet Communications, Inc., 1969.
- Electra [aka Elektra] [USA: The Amber Princess] (1963)
- Electra. 1963. Consul. London: World Distributors (Manchester) Ltd., 1965.
- Oedipus [USA: The Eagle King] (1964)
- Oedipus. 1964. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1968.
- Killer in Dark Glasses (1965)
- Bang You're Dead! (1966)
- The Green Man (1966)
- The Green Man. 1966. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1968.
- Desperate Journey (1954)
- Legions of the Eagle (1954)
- Legions of the Eagle. Illustrated by Christine Price. 1954. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1973.
- The Eagles Have Flown (1954)
- Ask for King Billy (1955)
- Viking's Dawn [Viking Trilogy, 1] (1955)
- Viking’s Dawn. Illustrated by Christine Price. 1955. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1972.
- Hounds of the King (1955)
- Hounds of the King, with Two Radio Plays (1965)
- Hunter Hunted (1957)
- Men of the Hills (1957)
- The Road to Miklagard [Viking Trilogy, 2] (1957)
- The Road to Miklagard. Illustrated by Christine Price. 1957. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1972.
- The Children's Crusade (1958)
- Don't Expect Any Mercy (1958)
- The Return of Robinson Crusoe (1958)
- The Bombard (1959)
- Wickham and the Armada (1959)
- Viking's Sunset [Viking Trilogy, 3] (1960)
- Viking’s Sunset. Illustrated by Christine Price. 1960. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin / London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1971.
- Red Settlement (1960)
- The Golden One (1961)
- Man with a Sword (1962)
- War Dog (1962)
- Horned Helmet (1963)
- The Burning of Njal (1964)
- The Last of the Vikings (1964)
- The Bronze Sword (1965)
- The Centurion: Augmented Version (1967)
- Splintered Sword (1965)
- The Queen's Brooch (1966)
- Swords from the North (1966)
- The Windswept City (1967)
- Vinland the Good (1967)
- The Dream Time (1967)
- How I See Apocalypse (1946)
- Dylan Thomas: Dog among the Fairies (1949)
- Dylan Thomas: 'Dog among the Fairies'. London: Lindsay Drummond Ltd., 1949.
- Castles and Kings (1959)
- The True Books: About Castles (1959)
- The Crusades (1962)
- [with Ronald Ewart Oakeshott] Fighting Men: How Men Have Fought Through the Ages (1963)
- The Crusades (Blackie - Know About Series, 1963) history
Edited:
- [with J. F. Hendry] The New Apocalypse (1939)
- [with J. F. Hendry] The White Horseman: Prose and Verse of the New Apocalypse (1941)
- [with Stefan Schimanski] Transformation (1943)
- [with Stefan Schimanski] Wartime Harvest: An Anthology of Prose and Verse (1943)
- [with John Pudney] Air Force Poetry (1944)
- Herbert Read: An Introduction to His Work by Various Hands (1944)
- [with Stefan Schimanski] A Map of Hearts (1944)
- [with Stefan Schimanski] Transformation 2 (1944)
- [with J. F. Hendry] The Crown and Sickle: An Anthology (1945)
- [with Stefan Schimanski] Transformation 3 (1945)
- [with Stefan Schimanski] Transformation 4 (1946) [with Stefan Schimanski] Leaves in the Storm: A Book of Diaries, with a Running Commentary by Stefan Schimanski & Henry Treece (1947)
- Selected Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1948)
- [with Stefan Schimanski] A New Romantic Anthology (1949)
Fiction:
Children's fiction:
Non-fiction:
- Alldritt, Keith. Modernism in the Second World War: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Basil Bunting and Hugh MacDiarmid (1989)
- Blythe, Ronald, ed. Components of the Scene: Stories, Poems & Essays of the Second World War. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.
- Day Lewis, Cecil. The Complete Poems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.
- Duffy, Carol Ann, ed. Armistice: A Laureate's Choice of Poems of War and Peace. London: Faber, 2018.
- Fussell, Paul, ed. The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern War. A Scribners Book. London: Macdonald & Co (Publishers) Ltd., 1991.
- Hynes, Samuel. The Soldier's Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. 1997. Pimlico. London: Random House, 1998.
- Selwyn, Victor, with Erik de Mauny, Ian Fletcher & Norman Morris, ed. Poems of the Second World War: The Oasis Selection. Foreword by Sir John Hackett. Everyman’s Classics. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1985.
- Skelton, Robert, ed. Poetry of the Forties. The Penguin Poets. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
- Stallworthy, Jon, ed. The Oxford Book of War Poetry. 1984. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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- category - English Poetry (post-1900): Alphabetical
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