Landscape With Figure
Gillian Reynolds
Daily Telegraph, 8 June 2004
Sunday's feature on Radio 3, Landscape With Figure, had the real thing, an unsentimental and challenging portrait by Sean Street of Keith Douglas, the Second World War poet. Douglas was a tank commander in the Sherwood Rangers. He died in a shellburst three days after D-Day, on a reconnaissance mission (described here by one of his surviving fellow officers as "totally irresponsible", seeing as Douglas was second-in-command). The padre who buried him spoke, as did poets, his biographer and people who knew him. In parallel, we received a first-rate analysis of his verse, how it changed after desert combat, loosening in structure, tightening its impact.
