ABSTRACT
It is a curious fact that what is probably the most widely quoted and anthologised single poem written in the Second World War came from the pen of some one who served only a few months in the Army before being released to work at the Foreign Office. This poem, by Henry Reed, is called Naming of Parts and it is the first in a sequence entitled Lessons of the War. Reed was a war poet only in the sense that he wore uniform and underwent military training and without that experience he would not have been able to write the three Lessons of the War (subsequent sections were added to this group of poems long after hostilities had ended, but with these we are not here concerned). He saw no combat as a soldier and he was not interested in the problems that Douglas, Lewis, and Ross in their different ways attempted to solve, those of communicating the sense of what it was like to serve in foreign lands, facing imminent and violent death, and of articulating the longings, anxieties and frustrations of the fighting serviceman in statements that were at once subjective and self-exploratory yet representative of the spirit of a generation.
