The Second World War did not produce the kind of recognition for a specific group of poets associated with it than did the First. Alun Lewis (1915-1944) is perhaps the best known, and was an excellent poet, but he has none of the recognition today granted to figures like Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). One of the other poets who died in the Second World War conflict, Sydney Keyes, is symptomatic of this in not being a well known name. And yet in his 21 years (he lived from 1922 to 1943) he showed huge promise, and in works like `A Garland for John Clare’ achieved a tone which was both wistful, lyrical and sophisticated.
According to the memoir by Michael Meyer prefacing the first edition of his works, published posthumously in 1944, Keyes was born in May 1922 in Dartford, one of the staging posts of the London to Canterbury Roman road close to the Thames. His mother died soon after his birth and his father, a soldier who had served in India, was mostly absent during this childhood and youth. Keyes was therefore looked after by his grandfather, a forceful figure who had worked in the milling business and ended up patenting Darent flour, an achievement for which he was accorded the freedom of Dartford.
Prone to ill health and relatively isolated because of the age of his guardian, Keyes was send to Dartford Grammar School in 1931 on the marriage of his grandfather for the third time. In 1934 he passed the Common Entrance public school exam and went to Tonbridge School, about 20 miles from his home. He found this more conducive than the environment in Dartford, a largely industrial place during his life there. `Outwardly,’ Meyer said, `Keyes was … amiable, pensive impenetrable.’ (`The Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes’, Ed Michael Meyer, Routledge, London, 1945, p xiii). Exposure to French culture through a visit there in 1939, and then to other influences on going to Queen’s College, Oxford, started to enrich his work. In 1942, nearing the end of his degree, he joined the army in Omagh, Northern Ireland. In September 1942 he was commissioned the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment and sent to Tunisia, where he saw two weeks of active service before dying during a patrol exercise on April 29th 1943.
Keyes wrote a great deal about death – something his reading of Rainer Maria Rilke, who he called the `Poet of Death’ had inspired in him. That he died so young is therefore eerily symbolic, though in letters he was dismissive of the idea of a `death wish.’ He did not live long enough to develop his ideas fully around this. As Meyer says, however, `What he achieved is remarkable, not because of his youth, but for its intrinsic worth. .. he breathed life into many of the traditions of English poetry.’ (Ibid, xx)
Keyes wrote a little of the environment around him, but not directly of Dartford. A 1940 poem, `Greenwich Observatory’, talks of `This onion-dome holds all intricacies/Of intellect and star-struck wisdom.’ But it soon moves into intellectualising this, changing its focus. `A Garland for John Clare’ from 1941 focusses on his interest in more intimate, introspective interests. It is addressed directly to the great 18th and 19th century poet:
`Whether you’d fear the shrillness of my voice,
The hedgehog-skin or nerves, the blind desire
For power and safety, that was all my doubt.
It was unjust. Accept, then, my poor scraps
Of proper life, my waste growth of achievement.
Even the cold eye and the failing hand
May be acceptable to one long dead.’
Keyes time at Dartford Grammar School was commemorated in events in the mid 1980s.