COLLECTED
POEMS OF HENRY
REED
Edited and Introduced by
Jon Stallworthy
Oxford University Press, £20
HENRY Reed is the chap who sent up Eliot something rotten with his parody, Chard Whitlow:
As we get older we do not get any younger.
Seasons return, and today 1 am fifty-five,
And this time last year I was fifty-four,
And this time next year I shall be sixty-two ...
Reed's other claim to fame is Naming of Parts, a poem that plays off military gun terminology against the activity of birds and bees and blossoms in a conscript spring. Amusingly sly, this has, like the Eliot guying, a deft dab of camp about it, and it comes as no surprise to learn from Jon Stallworthy's introduction to the Collected Poems that Reed was homosexual. Is it the evasion of this matter that makes the rest of his work so cleverly heartless? Or was Reed one of those bright unfortunates who only get identity by mocking others? An anthology of loose ends would seem to me a fair description of his serious "original" work collected here, while that joke about Eliot may be immortal.
The Eliot parodied by Reed is of course specifically the Eliot of Four Quartets, which is to say Eliot at his most Parnassian. I borrow that useful term from a critical distinction in one of Gerard Manky Hopkins's letters, where he divides verse into two kinds, the inspired and the Parnassian. The Parnassian, Hopkins says, can be written only by real poets, but it is not in the highest sense poetry, being "spoken on and from the level of a poet's mind, not, as in the other case, when the inspiration, which is the gift of genius, raises him above himself". Parnassian, in other words, is what a poet writes when he tries to write a poem. The inspired poem comes at its own will.
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