Naming of Parts

Last updated

"Lessons of the War: I: Naming of Parts", more commonly referred to simply as "Naming of Parts", is a poem by Henry Reed, in which a lecture on the parts of the Enfield rifle [1] is juxtaposed with observations about nature in springtime. It was first published in the magazine New Statesman and Nation , in August 1942.

Contents

Reception and analysis

Roger Rosenblatt calls it a "clever trick" of a poem, and emphasizes how the nomenclature of the rifle parts "mimics the flowering of spring". [2] Susan Manning considered it to be "a studied, ironic catalogue of some parts of experience silencing others" which "excludes more than it includes", noting the presence of "the beauty of nature and its utter irrelevance to the human struggle". [3]

Vernon Scannell observed that the poem is contrapuntal, in that it contains the voices of both the instructor and the trainee; he also outlined a "thread of sexual innuendo" which "becomes unequivocal in the third and fourth stanzas". [4]

Origin

While serving in the British Army during the Second World War, Reed "would entertain his friends by giving a comic incitation of a sergeant-instructor", and subsequently became fascinated by the cadence of "the utterances of the NCO"; these formed the basis for "Naming of Parts". [4]

Related Research Articles

A. E. Housman British classical scholar and poet (1859-1936)

Alfred Edward Housman, usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet. His cycle of poems, A Shropshire Lad wistfully evoke the dooms and disappointments of youth in the English countryside. Their simplicity and distinctive imagery appealed strongly to Edwardian taste, and to many early 20th-century English composers both before and after the First World War. Through their song-settings, the poems became closely associated with that era, and with Shropshire itself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.

Thomas Brackett Reed U.S. Representative from Maine, and Speaker of the House

Thomas Brackett Reed, was an American politician from the state of Maine. A member of the Republican Party, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives 12 times, first in 1876, and served as Speaker of the House, from 1889 to 1891 and again from 1895 to 1899.

Henry David Thoreau 19th-century American essayist, poet and philosopher

Henry David Thoreau was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience", an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow American poet and educator

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline. He was the first American to translate Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and was one of the Fireside Poets from New England.

Henry Reed was a British poet, translator, radio dramatist, and journalist.

Henry Newbolt English writer (1862–1938)

Sir Henry John Newbolt, CH was an English poet, novelist and historian. He also had a role as a government adviser with regard to the study of English in England. He is perhaps best remembered for his poems "Vitaï Lampada" and "Drake's Drum".

Susan Fenimore Cooper American writer and amateur naturalist

Susan Augusta Fenimore Cooper was an American writer and amateur naturalist. She founded an orphanage in Cooperstown, New York and made it a successful charity. The daughter of writer James Fenimore Cooper, she served as his secretary and amanuensis late in his life.

Frances Harper

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an abolitionist, suffragist, poet, teacher, public speaker, and writer. She was one of the first African American women to be published in the United States.

Karl Shapiro American poet

Karl Jay Shapiro was an American poet. He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.

<i>The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse</i>

The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse is a poetry anthology edited by Philip Larkin. It was published in 1973 by Oxford University Press with ISBN 0-19-812137-7. Larkin writes in the short preface that the selection is wide rather than deep; and also notes that for the post-1914 period it is more a collection of poems, than of poets. The remit was limited by him to poets with a period of residence in the British Isles. Larkin's generous selection of Thomas Hardy's poems has been noted for its influence on Hardy's later reputation. On the other hand, he was criticized, notably by Donald Davie, for his inclusion of "pop" poets such as Brian Patten. The volume contains works by 207 poets.

Mathilde Blind

Mathilde Blind, was a German-born English poet, fiction writer, biographer, essayist and literary critic. In the early 1870s she emerged as a pioneering female aesthete in a mostly male community of artists and writers, and by the late 1880s she had become a prominent voice and leader among New Woman writers, including Vernon Lee, Amy Levy, Mona Caird, Olive Schreiner, Rosamund Marriott Watson, and Katharine Tynan. Her work was praised by Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, Amy Levy, Edith Nesbit, Arthur Symons and Arnold Bennett. Her widely discussed poem The Ascent of Man represents a distinctly feminist response to the Darwinian theory of evolution.

<i>The Phoenix and the Turtle</i> poem by Shakespeare

The Phoenix and the Turtle is an allegorical poem about the death of ideal love by William Shakespeare. It is widely considered to be one of his most obscure works and has led to many conflicting interpretations. It has also been called "the first great published metaphysical poem". The title "The Phoenix and the Turtle" is a conventional label. As published, the poem was untitled. The "turtle" is the turtle dove, not the shelled reptile.

<i>The Kenyon Review</i> Academic journal

The Kenyon Review is a literary magazine based in Gambier, Ohio, US, home of Kenyon College. The Review was founded in 1939 by John Crowe Ransom, critic and professor of English at Kenyon College, who served as its editor until 1959. The Review has published early works by generations of important writers, including Robert Penn Warren, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Flannery O'Connor, Boris Pasternak, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Taylor, Dylan Thomas, Anthony Hecht, Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, Derek Walcott, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, Woody Allen, Louise Erdrich, William Empson, Linda Gregg, Mark Van Doren, Kenneth Burke, and Ha Jin.

<i>Georgics</i> Poem by Virgil

The Georgics is a poem by Latin poet Virgil, likely published in 29 BCE. As the name suggests the subject of the poem is agriculture; but far from being an example of peaceful rural poetry, it is a work characterized by tensions in both theme and purpose.

Amy Levy British writer

Amy Judith Levy was a British essayist, poet, and novelist best remembered for her literary gifts; her experience as the first Jewish woman at Cambridge University and as a pioneering woman student at Newnham College, Cambridge; her feminist positions; her friendships with others living what came later to be called a "New Woman" life, some of whom were lesbians; and her relationships with both women and men in literary and politically activist circles in London during the 1880s.

A sentence diagram is a pictorial representation of the grammatical structure of a sentence. The term "sentence diagram" is used more when teaching written language, where sentences are diagrammed. The model shows the relations between words and the nature of sentence structure and can be used as a tool to help recognize which potential sentences are actual sentences.

Vernon Scannell English writer and poet

Vernon Scannell was a British poet and author. He was at one time a professional boxer, and wrote novels about the sport.

Jon Silkin was a British poet.

Nature writing is nonfiction or fiction prose or poetry about the natural environment. Nature writing encompasses a wide variety of works, ranging from those that place primary emphasis on natural history facts to those in which philosophical interpretation predominate. It includes natural history essays, poetry, essays of solitude or escape, as well as travel and adventure writing.

References

  1. Point of Balance: A Lesson in "Naming of Parts", by Roger Hyndman, in English Journal ; Vol. 50, No. 8 (Nov., 1961), pp. 570-571+577
  2. Essay: The Naming of Parts, by Roger Rosenblatt, at PBS NewsHour ; published July 29, 2002; retrieved February 3, 2019
  3. Naming of Parts; or, The Comforts of Classification: Thomas Jefferson's Construction of America as Fact and Myth, by Susan Manning, in Journal of American Studies ; Volume 30, Issue 3 December 1996 , pp. 345-364
  4. 1 2 "Henry Reed and Others", in Not Without Glory: Poets of the Second World War, by Vernon Scannell; published 1976 by Woburn Press, London; excerpted at Sole Arabian Tree