Sidney Keyes: Collected Poems

by Sidney Keyes, Peter Meyer (Editor)

Including a wide variety of poems and dramatic monologues, this collection of Sidney Keyes's work demonstrates the poet's mastery of literature. Keyes was considered by some to be a prodigy, writing strikingly even before his undergraduate years at Oxford. His work illustrates his fusion of Romanticism and Continental style derived from his interest in such artists as Rilke, Wordsworth, Yeats, Schiller, and Klee. His unique, macabre, pastoral landscapes wildly separate him from his contemporaries.

Sidney Keyes was killed in action in Tunisia in 1943. He was 20 years old. With Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis he is one of the oustanding poets of World War II. His dramatic monologues, his poems of landscape, of the weird and macabre, his mastery of blank verse, set him apart.

Genres: Poetry

180 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Sidney Arthur Kilworth Keyes was an English poet. Only two books were published during his lifetime: The Cruel Solstice and The Iron Laurel. He died in action in 1943, and in 1945 a third book was published: The Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes.

In 1943, Keyes was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for The Cruel Solstice and The Iron Laurel.