Sidney Keyes was killed in action in Tunisia in 1943. He was twenty years old. With Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis he is regarded as one of the outstanding poets of World War II.

Even before he was an undergarduate, Sidney Keyes was something of a prodigy producing verse of a remarkable accomplishment. A celebrated Oxford poem, 'Remember Your Lovers' ('Young men walking the open streets/Of death's republic, remember your lovers.') was written in an exam room, when he had finsihed early.

Carcanet published his Collected Poems in 2002.