helen goethals
and those not stationed abroad threw themselves into the bohemian life of literary
London,so well described in the memoirs of Julian Maclaren-Ross, Derek Stanford,
and others. For those who could not avoid call-up, the conflict between patriotic and
poetic duty was resolved by separating action and thought. It is for this reason that
Henry Reed’s ‘Naming of Parts’ remains so emblematic of the War. By juxtaposing
two voices, the strident, public voice of the war instructor and the privatesotto voce
of the ordinary sensual man, it enacts that very outward acquiescence and inner
resistance that Orwell had predicted would be liberating for poetry:
To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.^6The individual, sensual point of view became not only the liberating postulate of
poetry, but could even be seen, as here by Francis Scarfe, to fulfil a patriotic function:
The greatest change war produced in me was to help me towards writing, with deeper feeling
and sensual appreciation, lyrics about ordinary things and people. I regard these not only
as a means of self-preservation, but also as a necessary part of a writer’s job in a war: the
preservation of all that is permanent and moving and simple in human life.^7
More importantly, the normal circumstances of war appeared to absolve the poet
from performing what had until recently been seen as one of his main functions,
that of telling the truth. In wartime, either the truth was not known or, if known,
could not be told, lest the information fall into the hands of the enemy: ‘Careless talk
costs lives.’ If the poet could not be truthful, he would at least be honest, offering
the reader only the evidence of his own senses. To paraphrase Browning, rather
than lend his mind out, he would lend his eyes and ears out. The truth about the
War would be the aggregate of the poets’ honest observations. As one soldier-poet
remarked: ‘Although no one is likely to confine the sprawl of this war in a single
poem, the collected work should form a mosaic of the responsibility, the purpose,
the feel, the look of it, and the human being in it, that may possibly be new.’^8 Far
from being new, it was a fundamentally conservative point of view. The deliberate
short-sightedness of the poets challenged neither the post-Romantic view of poetry
as essentially lyrical—turning on a single emotion—nor the post-Romantic view
of war as the continuation of politics by other means. The poets of the Second
(^6) Henry Reed, ‘Naming of Parts’, inCollected Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991), 49.
(^7) Francis Scarfe,The Liberation of Poetry 1930–1941(London: George Routledge & Sons, 1942), 198.
(^8) Oscar Williams, ‘Comments by the Poets’, inidem(ed.),The War Poets(New York: John Day,
1945), 28.