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More than any other antebellum scholar, Henry Reed pioneered the critical reception of William Wordsworth in America. As Wordsworth's first American editor, Reed produced the most authoritative early edition of the complete works published in the United States and furthered Wordsworth's reputation in lectures and essays. He protected the poet from copyright infringement and even advised him on financial matters (roles for which Reed's legal training equipped him). While the two men never met, their correspondence during Wordsworth's last fourteen years showed that Reed's reverence for Wordsworth was matched by the poet's affectionate respect for his young American editor. Reed did have other interests, among them securing the English language and its literature as academic disciplines. Nonetheless, as his friends noted with amusement, in every subject Reed considered he invariably returned to Wordsworth "as the needle to the pole." All of Reed's scholarship derived from his admiration for the purity of language and the moral seriousness he found exemplified in Wordsworth's poetry.
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