‘We talked of girls, and dropping bombs on Rome’

Alun Lewis was born in 1915 and grew up near Aberdare, a mining town in South Wales. His three brothers worked in the local coal mines; Alun won awards to study for degrees, achievements that were anything but commonplace among people from his sort of background in the 1930s, and aimed for a career in journalism, but found work scarce and eventually followed his father into school teaching. This career was also cut short, by war, and he died on active service in Burma in 1944, four months before his twenty-ninth birthday, having suffered a self-inflicted and possibly accidental gunshot wound to the temple. He had recently completed his second book of poems, which, like the first, was written almost exclusively while its author was in the armed forces, and had enjoyed a period of literary success roughly as long as his time in the army.

Alun Lewis is often regarded alongside Keith Douglas as one of the two outstanding English-language ‘war poets’ of the Second World War. This might in part be because – unlike many of the other poets focused on in this book – the lives and literary careers of Lewis and Douglas share certain traits that in the public conscience link them inexorably and almost exclusively to that conflict. The war took their lives, but it also saw their poetry come of age, and was perhaps even the catalyst for its sudden maturity; like so many of the iconic poets of the First World War, such as Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, their art was suddenly and greatly developed as a result of the event that would also curtail it. Of course, this also means that their poetry never had the chance to develop: Charles Causley, for example, also matured as a poet during and in part because of his service in the war and wrote about it extensively, but he lived on to the end of the twentieth century so we remember him also for his later poetic achievements with the ballad, religious poetry and children's verse. Lewis, however, comes to us now as a poet defined by the war, whether he would have liked it or not – and as a rougher and less developed (if also more ambitious) talent than the younger Keith Douglas.