Sidney Keyes

Sidney Arthur Kilworth Keyes (born May 27, 1922 in Dartford , Kent , † April 29, 1943 in Tunisia ) was a British poet who was posthumously awarded the Hawthornden Prize in 1943 .

Life

Keyes first attended the Tonbridge School and already demonstrated poetic talent through an elegy written in 1938 and dedicated to his grandfather . After leaving school he started in 1940 with a scholarship to study history at Queen's College of the University of Oxford , where he gave the book of poems Cherwell and together with Michael Meyer , the collection of poems Eight Oxford Poets (1941) out of which he beside Keith Douglas and John Heath-Stubbs also contributed to most of the poems such as "Remember Your Lovers". His first own collection of poems, The Iron Laurel , was published in 1942. Shortly thereafter, he began his military service in the British Army and was killed while on patrol as a lieutenant during the Africa campaign in Tunisia.

In 1943 he was posthumously awarded the Hawthornden Prize for The Iron Laurel and the poetry collection The Cruel Solstice (1943) , published after his death .

His almost absorbing interest in myths and legends is reflected in many of his poems, with poets such as William Butler Yeats , William Wordsworth , Rainer Maria Rilke , John Clare , Thomas Hardy , Alfred Edward Housman and Edward Thomas also influencing and inspiring him. In the longer poems "The Foreign Gate", a 400-line poem written between February and March 1942, and "The Wilderness" he strove for a poem that included a comprehensive metaphysical philosophy . His best work, albeit less ambitiously, balances his mythical intuitions with closely observed drawings of English landscapes.

In 1945 Collected Poems was published , a collection of his poems with a foreword by his college friend Michael Meyer, who also published Keyes' early works in 1948 under the title Minos of Crete: Plays and Stories .

Background literature

Maria Dose: Poetry as a reflection on poetry: interpretations of Sidney Keyes' poetry , dissertation , University of Hamburg , 1964
John Guenther: Sidney Keyes: A Biographical Inquiry , 1967
Peter Höschele: The Poetry of Sidney Keyes: Critical Edition and Commentary , Dissertation, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen , 1968

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Keyes, Sidney
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Keyes, Sidney Arthur Kilworth (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	British writer and soldier in World War II
DATE OF BIRTH	May 27, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH	Dartford , Kent
DATE OF DEATH	April 29, 1943
Place of death	Tunisia