My paper will examine DouglasвЂ™s approaches to writing war and thereby also think about ways in which Second World War writing is indebted to or moving on from both the writings of the First World War and its characteristic modernist techniques, as Malcolm Bradbury suggested in вЂњWhat Happened to Writing in the 40s, or Closing Time in the Gardens of the WestвЂќ (1987).

Like many of his predecessors, Douglas has become known for his war poetry, yet much of his own early responses to the desert war are prose and non-fictional: we have his Letters and his autobiographical narrative, Alamein to Zem Zem, written during the desert war, as well as his Collected Poems. Having been tutored by Edmund Blunden at Oxford, Douglas was only too well aware of the generation of writers and writing before him and only too interested in renewing and rewriting their ways of transforming experience into art. Douglas here self-reflexively questions a literary tradition of representing the personal imaginary in war, negotiating his own position as both critic and вЂњmodern poetвЂќ who is thinking, writing and reading the lived realities of the Second World War in the light of the modernist tradition.ДўThis essay would like to use DouglasвЂ™s argument as a starting point to subsequently interrogate his non-fictional prose writings as an expansion and potential revision of modernist ways of thinking and writing war. Hell cannot be let loose twice Almost all that a modern poet on active service is inspired to write, would be tautologicalвЂќ (вЂњPoets in this WarвЂќ 352). They do not write because there is nothing new, from a soldierвЂ™s point of view, about this war except its mobile character. вЂњThere are such poets but they do not write. Second World War writing, conversely, had not. The First World War, Douglas argues, had вЂњinspired to their finest effortsвЂќ and demanded a new aesthetics, вЂњa new type of writing to commentвЂќ (вЂњPoets in this WarвЂќ 350). In it, Douglas appears bemused by the fact that вЂњIn the fourth year of this war, we have not a single poet who seems to be an impressive commentator on itвЂќ (вЂњPoets in this WarвЂќ 351). 1 In May 1943, having completed several war poems and started on his narrative of desert fighting in North Africa, Alamein to Zem Zem, Keith Douglas writes an essay that reads almost as a complaint, an essay he entitles вЂњPoets in this WarвЂќ.

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