By the time he was killed in Normandy, aged only twenty-four, in June 1944, Keith Douglas had achieved a body of work that has earned him the reputation as the most brilliant and promising poet of the Second World War. He began writing when he was at school at Christ''s Hospital, continued at Oxford, and then when he was in the army in England and in the Middle East.This is the definitive edition of his poems, edited by Desmond Graham, Douglas''s biographer, and introduced by Ted Hughes.