Henry Reed

Notable Works

• A Map of Verona (1946)
• Naming of Parts (Poem)
• The Advertisement (1969) translation of L'inserzione by Natalia Ginzburg
• The Streets of Pompeii and Other Plays for Radio (1971)

About

Born in Birmingham, England, poet Henry Reed was the son of a master bricklayer. He was educated at King Edward VI School and the University of Birmingham, where he associated with W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Walter Allen and wrote his thesis on Thomas Hardy. Reed worked as a teacher and journalist before being called up in 1941. He worked in naval intelligence during WWII as a Japanese translator. Although he had studied French and Italian at university and taught himself Greek, he did not take to learning Japanese, perhaps because of the military context.  He contributed poetry, criticism, plays, and adaptations of older works to BBC radio from 1944-1979, including the Hilda Tablet series in the 1950s, purportedly a documentary about researching the biography of a dead poet and novelist called ‘Richard Shewin’ which drew in part on Reed’s own experience researching a biography of Thomas Hardy.

Reed published only one volume of poetry during his lifetime: A Map of Verona (1946), which includes his much-anthologized poem “Naming of Parts.” Another often-anthologised poem is “Chard Whitlow: Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Evening Postscript”, a satire of T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton. Eliot himself was amused by “Chard Whitlow’s” imitations of his poetic style. Reed recorded all of Lessons of the War for a broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme in 1966. His Collected Poems (1991) included previously unpublished work. Reed’s verse dramas and radio plays were collected in The Streets of Pompeii and Other Plays for Radio (1971) and Hilda Tablet and Others (1971). He wrote a critical study, The Novel Since 1939 (1946), and his published translations include novels and plays by Honoré de Balzac, Ugo Betti, Natalia Ginzburg, Giacomo Leopardi and Paride Rombi. Henry Reed was a beneficiary of the RLF and a supporter.

Legacy

His gift of Copyright to the RLF from his literary estate helps support future generations of writers.