Professor Adrian Smith, Professor of Modern History, will give the Humanities Inaugural Lecture on Monday 9 June – ‘Captain Keith Douglas, killed Normandy, 9.6.1944 – the soldier-poet seventy years on’.
Captain Keith Douglas died on 9 June 1944, three days after crossing the Channel. His yeomanry regiment, the Sherwood Rangers, sustained heavy losses in Normandy but fought on until Germany surrendered. By then the huntsmen from the shires who rode to war in September 1939 were long dead, Douglas having chronicled their passing in Alamein to Zem Zem, his classic account of tank warfare in the Western Desert.
For a long time Douglas’s reputation rested as much on his prose as his poetry, and yet today it is the verse to which readers turn first.
The seventieth anniversary of Keith Douglas’s death marks an opportune moment to revisit work written under fire or in the immediate aftermath of battle, recognising the insight it provides into the harsh reality of ‘industrial war’, and the concerns of a generation intent on building a society better than the one born out of an earlier conflagration.
Each of the Inaugural Lectures in Humanities will have an end of lecture collection for the speaker’s nominated charity. For this lecture Professor Smith has chosen to support MS-UK (previously known as Multiple Sclerosis Resource Centre).
To register for this lecture please email Tracy Storey on [email protected]