Henry Reed (poet)

HOME

TheInfoList

Click Here for Items Related To - Henry Reed (poet)

OR:

Henry Reed (poet) on: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Amazon]

Henry Reed (22 February 1914 – 8 December 1986) was a British poet, translator, radio dramatist, and journalist.

Life and work

Reed was born in

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the West ...

and educated at King Edward VI School, Aston, followed by the

University of Birmingham , mottoeng = Through efforts to heights , established = 1825 – Birmingham School of Medicine and Surgery1836 – Birmingham Royal School of Medicine and Surgery1843 – Queen's College1875 – Mason Science College1898 – Mason Univers ...

. At university he associated with

W. H. Auden Wystan Hugh Auden (; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in ...

, Louis MacNeice and

Walter Allen Walter Ernest Allen (23 February 1911 – 28 February 1995) was an English literary critic and novelist and one of the Birmingham Group of authors. He is best known for his classic study ''The English Novel: a Short Critical History'' (1951). ...

. He went on to study for an MA and then worked as a teacher and journalist. He was called up to the Army in 1941, spending most of the war as a Japanese translator. Although he had studied French and Italian at university and taught himself Greek at school, Reed did not take to Japanese, perhaps because he had learned an almost entirely military vocabulary.

Walter Allen Walter Ernest Allen (23 February 1911 – 28 February 1995) was an English literary critic and novelist and one of the Birmingham Group of authors. He is best known for his classic study ''The English Novel: a Short Critical History'' (1951). ...

, in his autobiography ''As I Walked down New Grub Street,'' said Reed intended "to devote every day for the rest of his life to forgetting another word of Japanese." After the war he worked for the

BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...

...

as a radio broadcaster, translator and playwright, where his most memorable set of productions was the ''

Hilda Tablet Hilda Tablet is a fictitious "twelve-tone composeress" created by Henry Reed in a series of radio comedy plays for the British Broadcasting Corporation's Third Programme. Hilda is the inventor of '' musique concrète renforcée'' (literally, "r ...

'' series in the 1950s, produced by

Douglas Cleverdon Thomas Douglas James Cleverdon (17 January 1903 – 1 October 1987) was an English radio producer and bookseller. In both fields he was associated with numerous leading cultural figures. Personal life He was educated at Bristol Grammar School and ...

. The series started with ''A Very Great Man Indeed'', which purported to be a documentary about the research for a biography of a dead poet and novelist called Richard Shewin. This drew in part on Reed's own experience of researching a biography of the novelist

Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Word ...

. However, the '

Twelve-tone The twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and (in British usage) twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition first devised by Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer, who published his "law o ...

composeress' Hilda Tablet, a friend of Richard Shewin, became the most interesting character in the play; and in the next play, she persuades the biographer to change the subject of the biography to her – telling him "not more than twelve volumes". Dame Hilda, as she later became, was based partly on

Ethel Smyth Dame Ethel Mary Smyth (; 22 April 18588 May 1944) was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works and operas. Smyth tended t ...

and partly on

Elisabeth Lutyens Agnes Elisabeth Lutyens, CBE (9 July 190614 April 1983) was an English composer. Early life and education Elisabeth Lutyens was born in London on 9 July 1906. She was one of the five children of Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton (1874–1964), a me ...

(who was not pleased, and considered legal action). Reed's most famous poetry is in ''Lessons of the War'', originally three poems which are witty parodies of British army basic training during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, which suffered from a lack of equipment at that time. Originally published in ''

New Statesman and Nation The ''New Statesman'' is a British political and cultural magazine published in London. Founded as a weekly review of politics and literature on 12 April 1913, it was at first connected with Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other leading members o ...

'' (August 1942), the series was later published in ''A Map of Verona'' in 1946, which was his only collection published in his lifetime. " Naming of Parts", the first poem in ''Lessons of the War'', was also taught in schools. Three further poems have subsequently been added to the set. Another often-anthologised poem is "Chard Whitlow: Mr. Eliot's Sunday Evening Postscript", a satire of T. S. Eliot's ''

Burnt Norton ''Burnt Norton'' is the first poem of T. S. Eliot's ''Four Quartets''. He created it while working on his play '' Murder in the Cathedral'', and it was first published in his ''Collected Poems 1909–1935'' (1936). The poem's title refers to ...

''. Eliot himself was amused by "Chard Whitlow"'s mournful imitations of his poetic style ("As we get older we do not get any younger ..."). Reed made a radio programme, reading all of ''Lessons of the War'', which was broadcast on the BBC's Network Three on 14 February 1966. He was often confused with the poet and critic

Herbert Read Sir Herbert Edward Read, (; 4 December 1893 – 12 June 1968) was an English art historian, poet, literary critic and philosopher, best known for numerous books on art, which included influential volumes on the role of art in education. Read ...

(1893 – 1968); the two men were unrelated. Reed responded to this confusion by naming his 'alter ego' biographer in the ''Hilda Tablet'' plays "Herbert Reeve" and then by having everyone get the name slightly wrong. The Papers of Henry Reed are kept in the

University of Birmingham , mottoeng = Through efforts to heights , established = 1825 – Birmingham School of Medicine and Surgery1836 – Birmingham Royal School of Medicine and Surgery1843 – Queen's College1875 – Mason Science College1898 – Mason Univers ...

Library Special Collections.

References

External links

Henry Reed's life and worksChard Whitlow
read by Dylan Thomas {{DEFAULTSORT:Reed, Henry 1914 births 1986 deaths 20th-century English poets Bletchley Park people People educated at King Edward VI Aston School Writers from Birmingham, West Midlands Prix Italia winners World War II poets 20th-century English male writers Alumni of the University of Birmingham English male poets British Army personnel of World War II