Thanks to
dumbfoundry, my new favorite completely fake person (just edging out Lillian Mountweazel) is, officially,
MacSpaunday: a monster made of equal parts MacNeice, Spender, Auden, and C. Day-Lewis.
Times (London), "Radio 3," Sound, 3 October 1969, 19. "8.00, Summer: a play in six days and six nights." Play by Romain Weingarten, translated from the French and adapted for radio by Henry Reed.
Over at her eponymous weblog, poet and writer Carol Peters has posted a lengthy excerpt from
Stephen Spender's Poetry Since 1939 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1946). This short booklet is one of a series of British Council pamphlets on the Arts in Britain, published just after World War II, covering such subjects as ballet, films, music, painting, drama, and prose. Henry Reed wrote the volume for
The Novel Since 1939, which discusses contemporary works by Woolf, Greene, Joyce, Isherwood, Graves, Orwell, Cary, Huxley, and Waugh.
The section Ms. Peters quotes, "Conditions in Which Poets Have Worked," doesn't mention Reed, but does name several of his peers, and everyone he would eventually be compared to:
Then we come to the many poets in the Forces. Some of the most talented of these were killed, notably Sidney Keyes and Alun Lewis. In quantity, the poets in the Forces produced far more work than anyone else, and, apart from the writing of distinguished poets such as Vernon Watkins, F. T. Prince, Roy Fuller, Henry Treece, Alan Rook, Keidrych Rhys, Francis Scarfe, this poetry is the most difficult to judge at the present time while we are so close to it.
Reed's bit comes along a little later, in the chapter "Poets Who Have Become Known Since 1939": 'When Henry Reed's volume is published he will take his place with F.T. Prince, Vernon Watkins, and Terence Tiller as one of the really significant younger poets.'
I'm also reminded of Fussell's
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Amazon.com), which has an excellent chapter on "Reading in Wartime." (Unfortunately, Google Book Search delivers a disappointing "
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