The last time I saw Drummond Allison would have been the summer of 1942, during our final week at Oxford. On that occasion, knowing I would be a non-combatant for the duration, he adjured me to 'look after John Heath-Stubbs'-another noncombatant-who was to be the sole survivor, as it turned out, of that remarkable trio (or clique, as some averred) which dominated Oxford poetry in the early forties. The other two, Sidney Keyes and Drummond himself, were killed within a few months of one another. About the time I first met the three of them-through the accident of taking a room in the house in the High where Keyes also had digs-they had just brought out, with the help of Herbert Read, then literary adviser to Routledge, a handsome paperback anthology, Eight Oxford Poets. As is the way with undergraduate anthologies, there was a manifesto of sorts attached to it, proclaiming that they were anti-Auden (the Thirties had just ended; time to turn a new leaf) and pro-Romantic. Most of the verse fulfilled the promise made in the foreword, especially that of its author, Sidney Keyes; who at the time seemed to be the most accomplished of the contributors apart from Keith Douglas and John Heath-Stubbs. Others included Michael Meyer and Roy Porter; but a minor mystery is the non-inclusion of Philip Larkin, then at the university and writing Yeatsian verses as neo-romantic as anything in the anthology. The odd man out in that book was Drummond Allison: at ...