Henry Reed (1) (1914–1986)

Henry Reed attended school and university in his native Birmingham, England. After working as a teacher, he became a freelance journalist until called up for war service in 1941. He served in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, but was soon transferred to Bletchley Park as a translator of Italian and later, Japanese. His sequence, Lessons of the War, from A Map of Verona (1946), begins with "Naming of Parts" in which the poet counterpoints the official voice of the army instructor with the lyrical reflections of a green recruit. Reed later turned to writing scripts for the B.B.C., including a radio adaptation of Moby-Dick, and the well-known satirical Hilda Tablet series in the 1950s. He taught poetry and English literature at the University of Washington in the United States in the latter 1960s.