Simplify Me When I'm Dead

"Read him; he's a fine, irascible, powerful, cynical, imaginative poet who never had more than a little bit of a chance, as he says, because of military engagements that might be the end of him. And they were. But on the page—the pages—Keith Douglas exists: not still exists, but exists. And so does the war in the desert, and the brave and good poet that he was."—James Dickey, from Classes on Modern Poets and the Art of Poetry

“[Douglas's poetry] is still very much alive, and even providing life. And the longer it lives, the fresher it looks . . . It is not enough to say that the language is utterly simple, the musical inflection of it peculiarly honest and charming, the technique  flawless. The language is also extremely forceful; or rather, it reposes at a point it could only have reached, this very moment, by a feat of great strength . . . His triumph lies in the way he renews the simplicity of ordinary talk, and he does this by infusing every word with a burning exploratory freshness of mind."—Ted Hughes, from his Introduction

“Ted did a beautiful [BBC radio] program on a marvelous young British poet, Keith Douglas, killed in the last war . . . Both of us mourn this poet immensely and feel he would have been like a lovely big brother to us.”—from a letter Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother in June 1962