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Documenting the quest to track down everything written by
(and written about) the poet, translator, critic, and radio
dramatist, Henry Reed.
An obsessive, armchair attempt to assemble a comprehensive
bibliography, not just for the work of a poet, but for his
entire life.
Read " Naming of Parts."
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Contact:
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Reeding:
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The Savage Detectives: In 1970s Mexico City, two young poets start a militant literary movement, the Visceral Realists.
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The Last Picture Show: The poolhall, all-night cafe, parked cars, and picture show in a one-stoplight town in Texas.
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The Terror: A tale of the Franklin expedition, lost trying to find the Northwest Passage.
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Elsewhere:
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All posts for "Criticism"
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5.7.2008
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As afforded me by my time spent working a half-day on Easter Sunday, I was able to sneak out of the last couple of hours of work today, and managed to do something resembling genuine scholarship. There was a book on campus, in the library's Special Collections, which I had discovered hiding in plain sight on Professor Goethal's " Poetry & WW2" page: Poets in a War, by Kenneth A. Lohf (New York: Grolier Club, 1995). The book is a detailed catalog of an exhibition curated by Mr. Lohf, which was displayed at the Grolier Club of New York from December, 1995 through mid-February, 1996.
The Grolier Club is 'America's oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and enthusiasts in the graphic arts' (they are currently showing an autograph manuscript of Robert Burns' " Auld Lang Syne"). From the Club's webpage for Poets in a War:
In observance of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, the Grolier Club in December 1995 presented an exhibition featuring manuscripts, first editions, drawings and portraits of 130 British poets of the 1940s who served on the battlefronts and home front.
The book is lavishly illustrated with photographs and reproductions, and I was hopeful that it might contain a picture of Reed. Alas, no such luck, though there is a reproduction of the title page of Reed's 1970 collection, Lessons of the War (New York: Chilmark Press). The text does contains detailed bibliographic information on the Lessons and A Map of Verona (London: Jonathan Cape, 1946), as well as several appraisals of Reed's poetry:
Of the poets who produced one or more memorable poems, F.T. Prince's 'Soldier's Bathing' and Henry Reed's 'Naming of Parts' (the first part of his series of poems, 'Lessons of the War'), stand out because of the ways in which they treated their specific subjects...[.] Like Prince, Reed, who after a year in the Army worked at the Foreign Office for the remainder of the war, had written only one volume of poetry, A Map of Verona (1946), by the time the war ended...[.] Though his participation in the army was brief, his series of poems 'The Lessons of War,' [sic] collected in A Map of Verona, is among the best-known group of poems of the Second World War. Like 'Soldier's Bathing,' 'Naming of Parts,' the first poem in the series, is a meditative poem in which the central conflict is between a recruit's wandering thoughts and an army officer's emotionless voice of instruction in the use of a rifle, a voice with a decided sexual dimension which is lost on the recruit who thinks solely of the beauty and sensuousness of nature. It is the human scale of these poems—both of their speakers are soldiers—that facilitates our understanding of the meaning of war to the men caught in its turmoil. (p. 26)
The library's copy appeared to be in pristine condition, or at least it had been previously handled with the greatest care. I was loathe to ask for photocopies since it would involve putting pressure on the books' virgin spine, so I settled for copying out the relevant passages in longhand, and taking pictures of everything, in case I made any mistakes (more pics on the Reeding Lessons Flickr page). An hour well spent!
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1331. Palmer, Herbert. "English Poetry: 1938-1950—I." Fortnightly 1017 N.S. (September 1951): 624-628 [627].
Reed is included in the roll of poets who 'made their first appearance, or chief appearance, after 1937....'
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An excellent find in the series Poetry Criticism: in the entry for Randall Jarrell is a reprint of a 1948 review by Stephen Spender of Jarrell's collection Losses, from The Nation (1 May 1948). The collection contains many of Jarrell's famous poems which came out of his experiences in the Army Air Force during World War II, including "The Dead Wingman," "Pilots, Man Your Planes," and " Eighth Air Force."
Spender compares Jarrell to Robert Lowell, calling him a "modern" poet in a "certainly" American landscape; but he also compares his language to the Victorian poets:
Mr. Jarrell often reminds me of Tennyson and Browning. Or rather this will not seem strange if I quote from "Orestes at Tauris," which is a long, odd failure, merging into the language of prize poems with which the English Victorian writers once took the stage: So he looked; and yet in all that press
At Argos or Mycenae, or in all the isles
You never saw her like: a face so fair!
She wet your hair, and smoothed it with her hands,
Water ran down your face, and it looked pale
Under those dark and darkening locks; you shook them free,
And how ghastly it looked—your pale anxious face! This is Victorian Prize Poetry with a big V and two big P's, and to judge from Mr. Jarrell's remarks about Henry Reed when he does the same thing considerably better, I cannot believe Mr. Jarrell likes it himself.
"Considerably better!" Spender is, of course, referring to a dismissive review of Reed's A Map of Verona and Other Poems in The Nation just a month earlier, in which Jarrell compares Reed to "a nap after dinner."
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1330. Pritchett, V.S., ed. Turnstile One: A Literary Miscellany from the New Statesman and Nation. London: Turnstile Press, 1948. 144.
Collects "Naming of Parts," originally published in the New Statesman and Nation in August, 1942.
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I had a dentist appointment yesterday, for a checkup and cleaning. I've discovered that the more I hate the dentist's office, the better I take care of my teeth. I was in and out, thankfully. I had a couple of hours afterward before Special Collections at the main library closed at 5:45 pm.
There was a reference to Reed in an old issue of the New Review (Google Book Search) that I was hoping would pan into something. The problem with snippet views in Google is that, while you may have a page number, you often don't know which issue of a periodical that page is in. Or the year. All I knew from the link above was that it was during 1976-77.
The New Review is apparently rare enough to warrant being stored in Special Collections' Rare Books. Rare, but not that old. Hardly new, though. I filled out my callslip for both years. Turns out, New Review was a monthly magazine, so I've got almost twenty-four issues to hunt through. Finally, at nearly five o'clock, I found it: June, 1976.
Reed appears in a book review of Scannell's Not Without Glory and Banerjee's Spirit Above Wars, by Andrew Motion, "Bard's Army." It was a long hour for a short paragraph:
Sexual deprivation also produced a persistent, nagging eroticism in military life Henry Reed captures its wearying innuendo perfectly in 'Naming of Parts', not only in the title, but in the training process it describes: And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. Fuller similarly speaks with the voice of Everysoldier when he says 'The photographs of girls are on the wall', and the desolation which lies behind his remark is echoed throughout the work of Lewis. It is a far cry from the war poetry that they were brought up on, and a scrupulous account of the replacement of the admonitory patriot by the disaffected conscript.
Special Collections even made the photocopies for me.
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1329. Sinclair, Andrew. Dylan the Bard: A Life of Dylan Thomas. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. 140.
Mentions Rayner Heppenstall bringing Reed and other writers to the Stag's Head pub.
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Sidney Keyes was a youthful poet killed before he had time to register the impact of warfare; Alun Lewis registered the deadening effect of regimentation and the stimulus of travel, but left no record of the military action it seems it was his destiny to seek. Douglas sought action, found it, recorded it and his fear of its consequences, before he too died. Roy Fuller was excluded by circumstance from action and was able, literally from a distance, to mark the changes that wartime forced on society and the enclosed microcosm of the services. Each is an individual experience, and it is because of the quality of their work that they are accepted as the chief poets of the Second World War. But it is appropriate that none of them wrote the poem of the Second World War. That was written by Henry Reed.
Thus begins Robert Hewison's analysis of Reed's Lessons of the War poems, in the book Under Siege: Literary Life in London, 1939-1945 (Oxford, 1977). Interestingly, Hewison treats the whole sequence as a single work, mentioning, but not lingering on (or even quoting from), "Naming of Parts."
Hewison prefers instead to look at " Judging Distances" at some length. 'In this case the landscape has to be interpreted in formal terms; the distance cannot be judged emotionally, the territory must be seen as a map. But in the trainee-soldier the surviving civilian persists in reading the topography with his own eyes...' (p. 139). Though Hewison has chosen a slightly less famous poem, the resulting commentary is familiar: 'Individuality has to be sacrificed to the needs of the military machine, the landscape reduced to the terms of tactical necessity, but some small item of personality could be retained — the observing eye of the poet' (p. 140).
He then turns to " Unarmed Combat," the last of Reed's Lessons published during wartime, concluding, 'Henry Reed achieves a rare fusion between soldier and poet of the Second World War...' (p. 140).
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1328. Times (London). "Broadcasting." 26 October 1946, 6.
Reed's talk on the poetry of Edith Sitwell is scheduled this evening on the Third Programme's "The Poet and His Critic."
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I recently added, and failed to note here, Alan Jenkins' 1991 Independent review of Reed's Collected Poems, "In Other Men's Shadows." Jenkins notes the poet's debts to Hardy, Auden, and MacNeice (Reed 'pre-echoes' The Movement poets), but points out
[w]hat is Reed's and Reed's alone is a tonality, an emotional palette, a special feeling for romantic potentiality, the moment before something tremendous happens or after it has receded. The something tremendous — love, release, the revelation of transcendent beauty, all of these at once....
'Properly,' Jenkins says, the posthumous collection 'rescues Reed from the two-poem limbo to which the anthologies... have consigned him.'
Also very recently, I discovered a lovely summary of Reed's poetic influence and influences, in The New Guide to Modern World Literature, by Martin Seymour-Smith (New York: Peter Bedrick, 1985):
Henry Reed (1914) has published only one collection of poems, A Map of Verona (1947), but this is widely read — it remained in print for a quarter of a century. There are a few good uncollected poems. He has earned his living as a translator and writer of radio scripts — including the famous 'Hilda Tablet' series. Reed has written several distinctly different kinds of poem: the metaphysical, influenced above all by Marvell; a narrative, contemplative poetry influenced by Eliot (q.v.); parody — as in 'Chard Whitlow', which was Eliot's own favourite parody of himself; a narrative poem influenced not by Eliot but by Hardy (q.v.) — such as 'The Auction Sale'. Reed's justly famous 'Lessons of the War' sequence is in his metaphysical vein, exploiting double entendre to its limit, varying the tone from the wistful to the broadly comic (as in the third poem of the sequence). The less well known 'The Auction Sale' handles narrative as well as it can be handled in this age. Reed is a poet of greater range than is usually recognized; only his Eliotian contemplative poetry really fails to come off, and even this is eloquent and rhythmically interesting. That single paragraph comes the closest I've seen to placing Reed solidly in any school of poetry, even though it leaves him straddling Hardy's Naturalism, The Romantics, and the Moderns.
Additionally, I turned up a very nice exploration of the 'military/poetic problem' in " Judging Distances," in Robert Hewison's Under Siege: Literary Life in London, 1939-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), which I hope to be able to post soon. Stay tuned!
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1327. Times (London). "Broadcasting." 2 November 1946, 8.
Edith Sitwell's response to Reed's talk is scheduled this evening as "The Poet and His Critic": 2.
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The Annual Register, a "Review of Public Events at Home and Abroad," is a serial survey of history, politics, and the humanities, published in the U.K. since 1758. My campus library has nearly a complete run, parceled between print volumes and short stretches on microfilm. The trick, apparently, is to pay attention to the record in the online catalog, before realizing in the third floor stacks that the year you're looking for is actually on film in the basement, nine flights below.
The Register volume for 1946 delivers a quick criticism of Reed's first volume of poetry: 'In The Map of Verona [sic] (Cape), Henry Reed, one of the younger poets, develops a meditative romanticism not as yet sure of its own direction.'
The fact that his collection received notice at all speaks for Reed's promise as a poet, despite any reservations the editor may have had. The chapter surveying the literature of 1946 mentions several publications which also contain poems written by Reed: John Lehmann's Poems from New Writing , 1936-1946, which collects "Chrysothemis," and "The Wall"; and the journal Orion, which published Reed's "King Mark." Special attention is also paid to Edith Sitwell's The Song of the Cold (which Reed reviewed for the New Statesman in January, 1946), Richard Church's The Lamp, John Pudney's Selected Poems, Theseus and the Minotaur and Poems by Patric Dickinson, Poems from the North by Sir Shane Leslie, Vivian Locke Ellis' Collected Lyrical Poems, C.C. Abbott's The Sand Castle, Laurence Durrell's Plains and People, and Talking Bronco by Roy Campbell, among others.
Also noted is an anthology called For Those Who Are Alive (London: Fortune, 1946), an anthology of fifty of the 'youngest poets,' compiled by Howard Sergeant, editor of the journal Outposts. I wonder if, perhaps, something of Reed's is also collected there?
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1326. Thwaite, Anthony. "On Consulting 'Contemporary Poets of the English Language'." A Portion for Foxes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. 30-32.
Thwaite includes Reed in the course of naming poets listed in Contemporary Poets.
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I have a cartload of old Listener volumes from offsite storage waiting for me at the main branch, which unfortunately closed before I could get there today, due to an unanticipated power outage. But the universe sent me a small concession: my 1947 book review finally arrived from Interlibrary Loan this morning. (Never fails, it'll always show up the day after you claim it "Not received.")
I always feel an overwhelming thrill of discovery looking at these old documents and journals: the sense that no one else has read these pages since they were originally published, 50 or 60 years ago (no one except, possibly, the poor library clerk who had to photocopy them).
The Bulletin from Virginia Kirkus' Bookshop Service, back in the day at least, was a somewhat homespun affair: typewritten, mimeographed, and mailed to subscribing bookstores and libraries full of hungry patrons wondering which book to read next. Virginia Kirkus (1893-1980) read publishers' galleys, and wrote the succinct reviews herself.
An inarguably favorable review. Kirkus compares Reed with Richard Wilbur, a (slightly) younger American poet of more considerable plumb and prolificity. Both poets' first volumes of poetry appeared in America in 1947.
Reed if the more intellectual of the two, has a firm grasp of the poetic technique, he is more concrete and more vigorous and has a fine sense of irony. He seems therefore more of a force.
Read the entire, original review, " Two Young Poets" (.pdf).
Interestingly enough, Wilbur started out in cryptography during World War II, and was transferred to combat due to his political leanings (whereas Reed began his service with combat training, and was transferred to cryptography). Wilbur discusses the relationship between cryptography and poetry in these videotaped interviews. Not to be missed is " We need a cryptographer, but if we catch you overthrowing the government—you're out." (Both links to embedded video at People's Archive.)
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1325. Times (London). "Broadcasting." 31 January 1947, 6.
Reed's adaptation of Melville's Moby Dick replays this evening on the Third Programme, in two parts.
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I had a couple of days off around the Fourth of July, owing to a governor generous to his overworked state employees, and to an ongoing library construction/renovation project, which left my department almost completely unbuilt for several days.
Unfettered, I snuck over to the other campus library, to snag a 1965 book review written by Reed on Hugh D. Ford's A Poet's War: British Poets and the Spanish Civil War. I was chagrined to discover that our run of The Sunday Times doesn't begin until 1972.
In an attempt to salvage something of my visit, I decided to browse The Offical Index to the Times (London). I discovered, however, that that particular set is arranged by year and subject—which makes perfect sense—but is less helpful than a personal names index. Crestfallen, I was ready to disembark emptyhanded, when the adjacent title in the Index section caught my eye: The Book Review Digest.
Our main library shelves large sets of indexes separately, in their own section, lumped immediately following the bulk of the Reference collection. Somehow, after years of prowling the Reference books, I had overlooked this resource. Volume after volume of nothing but (American) book review citations, arranged by the years they were reviewed, with indications of positive and/or negative reviews, and including short quotations and lengthy excerpts!
I instinctively pulled down 1946, but Reed's poetry collection, A Map of Verona, wasn't published in the States until 1947. Quickly upgrading to the next volume, I found it quite easily: no fewer than four reviews indexed! Two of which I had already seen: Rago's review from Commonweal, and Breit's from The New York Times Book Review. But that left me two, never-before-seen, completely unheard of, reviews of Henry Reed! Two! Two! Two reviews! Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews. I nearly floated to the photocopiers, and exercised enormous restraint as I carefully replaced the Digest volume in its slot on the shelf, afterward, before nearly skipping to the online catalog.
The Kirkus review? Only available online, and only after 1969. Which meant requesting photocopies through Interlibrary Loan. The Library Journal we had, but the less relevant, more aged volumes are stored offsite, which meant I had to place my request and wait a day to see the result. To my dismay, the 50-word blurb had already been quoted in its entirety in Book Review Digest (which should have been painfully obvious, as they thoughtfully provide a word count):
Henry Reed is a young English poet whose work, until now, has been little known in this country. Many of the poems have legendary themes but their meaning is deeply rooted in our own 'age of anxiety.' The final pages are devoted to lyric interludes written for a BBC radio version of Moby Dick. Library Journal 72, no. 21 (1 December 1947): 1688.
And today was the sixth day since my Interlibrary Loan of a particular Bulletin from Virginia Kirkus' Bookshop was shipped, and still, the U.S. mail brings me no joy. Tomorrow, perhaps?
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1324. Times (London). "Broadcasting." 25 January 1947, 6.
Reed's adaptation of Melville's Moby Dick premieres this weekend on the Third Programme, in two parts.
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Several weekends ago I made a short excursion up to the state capital, to visit the Richmond Public Library. It was a lazy, rainy Sunday, and I needed, of all things, a 19th-century book on flowers.
The book was the Reverend Hilderic Friend's Flowers and Flower Lore (1883), and I was startled to find that it was not on the shelf. Up and down the folklore section I scanned. A word to the wise scholar: it never hurts to phone ahead.
Luckily, a librarian flew to my rescue, advising that their older texts are kept in closed stacks, downstairs in the basement. Whew! I had Friend's beautiful, leather-bound, two-volume set in my hands, momentarily. In the end, I found that they didn't even contain exactly what I was looking for. Such are the perils of blind librarying.
I consoled myself by browsing the stacks for poetry, discovering that my Dewey Decimals have become almost irreparably rusty. Poetry: 811, yes. English poetry? 821. Oh. They had several anthologies which I had indexed but never seen: notably, Dylan Thomas's Choice (Maud and Davies, eds. New York: New Directions, 1963). Deep into my Ziploc bag of dimes I dipped, to feed the ravenous Xerox machines.
The real boon was a book I had never heard of or seen: War Poetry: An Anthology, edited, and with an introduction and commentaries, by D.L. Jones (1968). This evening, I added Jones' commentary on the Lessons of the War poems to the website.
It also happened to be the last day of the Friends of the Library booksale, and from the pillaged remnants I managed to scavenge a small paperback of English translations of the poetry of Leopardi. They wanted 50¢, but I gave them a buck, and told 'em to keep the change.
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1322. Bishop, Johnathan. "The Individual Thing." Renascence 45, nos. 1-2 (Fall 1992-Winter 1993): 18.
Bishop expresses frustration at trying to find "Naming of Parts" in a modern anthology for his first class.
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"Whoever reviewed current verse in your July number is a nincompoop." This, in response to a 1946 book review of Reed's A Map of Verona, in the prestigious and estimable Poetry Review. I'm tempted to add the entire Donnybrook to the Henry Reed pages, since the cheesy defense is longer than the original salvo. From The Poetry Review 37, no. 3 (June/July 1946):
Poets and Pretenders The crux of any critical assessment of poetry is that it is not possible to make an exact definition of it, and in consequence it is difficult to determine what qualities, technical, aesthetic, and spiritual, should be found in it. Nevertheless, we recently listened to a lecture by an eminent Doctor who had placed his considerable talent for scientific research at the service of this problem. His analysis had indicated to him that the prime ingredients of good poetry were three, which he most aptly described as vitamins. These qualities were mystery, ecstasy and sublimity, and the distinguished lecturer expressed the view that verse could not be considered to have achieved a poetical standard unless one or more of these qualities was present in it....
A Map of Verona, by Henry Reed (Cape, 3s. 6d.) would be difficult to criticise upon the tri-une basis of mystery, ecstasy and sublimity. If it be judged upon its capacity to move the reader, or to inspire any one of these three states, it should delay us not at all; from which it will be gathered that we are presented by it with so little to praise or blame that we are amost debarred from comment. Take the first stanza from a poem called "Envoy". "Whatever sort of garden
You, I, or we shall build,
Neglected much, or cared for,
And all its great designs
Fulfilled or unfulfilled:
Built over ruined shrines,
Where others have loved and worshipped,
Or built on virgin ground:
Shaped or disorderly,
Let it at least be
Different from this", or look where you will, and there is the same incapacity to come to grips with anything real or vital such as could shatter the dull crust of the reader's wonted composure or banish for one beautiful moment the boredom of living.
And the answering justification, appearing in The Poetry Review 37, no. 4 (August/September 1946):
The Reviewer Answers a Critic "Whoever reviewed current verse in your July number is a nincompoop. His dismissal of Henry Reed's Map of Verona is unjust, and his critical method pompous, inefficient, and absurd."
Thus begins a letter from a correspondent who has obviously more energy than sense, or he would have abstained from prejudicing his case so grievously at the outset. There is a certain antique piquancy in receiving abuse from one who can advance no better reason for it than a difference of opinion, and Mr. Henry Reed, the bone of contention, might well wish to be saved from such a friend. Our correspondent quarrels too with out eminent doctor's theory of poetic vitamins and proceeds to adduce examples of great poetry which he alleges are starved of all three, which our readers may remember are mystery, ecstasy and sublimity. We gravely doubt his perception. He asserts, truly enough, that there are many kinds of poetry and argues somewhat triumphantly, as one making an unanswerable point, that we do not admonish Camembert for not being Stilton; but surely our correspondent is in some confusion here, since Camembert and Stilton both in their separate ways have the character of the best cheese, and indeed may both be said to possess ecstasy and sublimity, and more than a little touch of mystery. We insist upon uniformity as little in poetry as in our food. In both, however, there must be edibility, digestibility and nourishment, and we must feel when we have consumed them that we are the better for it. In any case, it is not the poetry, nor the cheese, which we admonish, but rather the person responsible for it; in the case of cheese we should be furious at any misdescription of the article, hailing the miscreant guilty of the deception before a magistrate. Unfortunately the written word enjoys an immunity which permits it to call itself what it will. On the other hand, we too have equal freedom and may speak our mind concerning it.
Lastly, our correspondent offers us three mere literary virtues in exchange for our bright trinity of poetic qualities. These are clarity, conciseness and penetration, and all the dull deliberation of this denial of the spiritual quality of poetry is really the last straw. Our correspondent signs his letter; but since it was written in heat and apparently without proper reflection it would be inconsiderate to give his name.
I'm not sure who to hold accountable here. The unnamed, vitamin-preoccupied theorist? Or the anonymous reviewer, for quoting a theorist who attempts to reduce poetry to three elemental qualities? (Can anyone venture a guess as to who this "eminent Doctor" of poetic theory might be? Who wrote the "nincompoop" letter in defense of Reed?) I think the Poetry Review should be held responsible. Not for a 60-year old, unfavorable review, necessarily. I have plenty of tepid-to-scathing reviews on the website, already. But cheese? Poetry Review! I implore you!
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1321. Jones, Robert C. "Not in the Aiming But the Opening Hand." Review of the Oxford Book of English Verse, 3rd ed. Sewanee Review 108, no. 1 (Winter 2000).
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An interesting article came to my attention this week: "'Naming of Parts,' 'Judging Distances,' Literary Snobbery and Careless Reading in the Analysis of Henry Reed's 'Lessons of the War'," by Joseph Petite, Ph.D., published in The Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 26, nos. 1-2 (March 2005). Essentially, Petite argues that past critics of "Naming of Parts" and the other "Lessons of the War" poems have relied too heavily on the supposition that there are two, separate voices, or tones, in the poems.
Traditional interpretations point to polar changes in Reed's tone, language, and diction, and argue that these opposites can be explained in one of two ways: either there are two voices in the poems, and we are hearing both the instructor and the recruit; or there is only one point of view — that of the recruit's — and we are listening through him, and are privvy to his inner thoughts.
Petite posits that this is so much literary trickery, and that too much reliance has been made on Freudian interpretations. Essentially, he believes the possibility has been ignored that there is just one speaker in the poems: the instructor. ‘Critics do not credit Reed with a more profound insight—the instructors are victims of war, grappling with how to be human in inhuman circumstances. Psychologically, language is their last line of self-defense, a way to survive the dehumanizing acts war requires. There is no need to "explain" the presence of such language. War-weary, instructors long for beauty, finding it in nature undisturbed by war and expressing themselves in a second register.’ Petite is particularly suspicious of O'Toole's stylistic analysis, Condon's "Freudian tour," and the conclusions in Beggs' dissertation.
It's a provocative thesis, but I find it hard to agree with a lot of what Petite puts forth, although I do concur that lengthy discussions of stylistics are tiresome, and often include more magical thinking and sleight-of-hand than proofs. But the idea that 'Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,' and there are no sexual connotations in "Naming of Parts" is patently ridiculous, and attempts to remove all the fun and playfulness from the poem. It's like arguing that all the women on Monty Python's Flying Circus were actually women.
By minding the evidence in biographies of Reed, it's obvious that the "Lessons of the War" are mocking in tone, and more or less autobiographic. Not the least of which is Scannell's assertion that Reed entertained his fellows in basic training by imitating their instructors. Most revealing, however, is the fact that when Reed adapted " Naming of Parts" (.mp3 file) for BBC radio, he split the poem into two speaking parts, and took the part of the recruit, himself.
A longer excerpt of "Literary Snobbery" can be found on the Questia website, and the entire article is available from Amazon.com as a digital download for $5.95.
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1320. Dunnett, Roderic. "The Skilful Anthologist." Choir & Organ 6, no. 1 (January-February 1998).
Bliss's "Aubade," composed for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, is a 'gem.'
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1st Lesson:
Reed, Henry
(1914-1986). Born: Birmingham, England, 22 February 1914; died: London, 8
December 1986.
Education: MA, University of Birmingham, 1936. Served: RAOC, 1941-42; Foreign Office, GC&CS, 1942-1945.
Freelance writer: BBC Features Department, 1945-1980.
Author of:
A Map of Verona: Poems (1946)
The Novel Since 1939 (1946)
Moby Dick: A Play for Radio from Herman Melville's Novel (1947)
Lessons of the War (1970)
Hilda Tablet and Others: Four Pieces for Radio (1971)
The Streets of Pompeii and Other Plays for Radio (1971)
Collected Poems (1991, 2007)
The Auction Sale (2006)
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