And it was Hughes, in a broadcast of 1962, an essay of 1963, and a 1964 edition of Douglas's poems (
Selected Poems), who brought Douglas a wider readership. The qualities Hughes so vigorously defined remain the basis of the poet's high reputation now that his
Complete Poems (1978) and a new 1979 edition of his vivid narrative of the desert war,
Alamein to Zem Zem (1946), make his work once more available: a fusion of intelligence and passion, a seemingly effortless lucidity of style, what Hughes termed "a burning exploratory freshness of mind" and Hill called "a fearlessness of the imagination." There has been little dissent: to Geoffrey Grigson, Douglas did not write a single line of poetry; to Ian Hamilton, he suffered from the tight-lipped insensitivity of the officers' mess. Generally Douglas is read and remembered for lying outside the impasse felt to be between the poetry of the 1930s and that of the 1940s; for an exceptionally precocious talent, writing fine poems from the age of fourteen; for the dozen or so poems written from firsthand experience of the desert war; and for the narrative of his battle experience.
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