Herbert Read

Herbert Read (1893-1960). Photo by Jac. de Nijs / Anefo, 1966. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Herbert Read
Born	4 1893(1893-Template:MONTHNUMBER-04) Kirkbymoorside, North Riding of Yorkshire
Died	12 1968(1968-Template:MONTHNUMBER-12) (aged 74) Stonegrave, North Riding of Yorkshire
Occupation	Anarchist poet, modern art historian, and literary & art critic
Nationality	English
Period	1915–1968
Influences Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, William Morris, Max Stirner, John Ruskin, George Orwell, T.S. Eliot

Sir Herbert Edward Read DSO MC (December 4, 1893 - June 12, 1968) was an English poet and critic of literature and art.

Life

Youth and education

Read was born in Kirkbymoorside in the North Riding of Yorkshire.

His studies at the University of Leeds were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, during which he served with the Green Howards in France. He received the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order, and reached the rank of Captain. During the war Read founded with Frank Rutter the journal Arts and Letters (an early publisher of the work of T. S. Eliot).

Career

As a critic of literature, Read mainly concerned himself with the English Romantic poets (e.g., The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry, 1953). He published a novel, The Green Child. He contributed to the Criterion (1922–1939) and he was for many years a regular art critic for the Listener.

Read was (and remains) best known as an art critic.(Citation needed) He was a champion of modern British artists such as Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. He became associated with Nash's contemporary arts group Unit One. Read was professor of fine arts at the University of Edinburgh (1931–33) and editor of trend-setting Burlington Magazine (1933–38).

He was an organizer of the London International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, and editor of the book Surrealism, published in 1936, which included contributions from André Breton, Hugh Sykes Davies, Paul Éluard, and Georges Hugnet. He also served as a trustee of the Tate Gallery and as a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum (1922–1939), as well as co-founding the Institute of Contemporary Arts with Roland Penrose in 1947.

From 1953–1954 Read served as the Norton professor at Harvard University.

For the academic year 1964-1965 and again in 1965, he was a fellow on the faculty at the Center for Advanced Studies of Wesleyan University.

He was the father of writer Piers Paul Read, BBC documentary maker John Read, and art historian Ben Read.

Writing

Poetry

Read's initial volume of poetry was Songs of Chaos, self-published in 1915. His next collection, published in 1919, was called Naked Warriors, and drew on his experiences fighting in the trenches of the First World War.

His work, which shows the influence of Imagism, was mainly in free verse. Read's conception of poetry was influenced by his mentors T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams, believing 'true poetry was never speech but always a song' (quoted with the rest of his definition What is a Poem ' in his 1926 essay of that name in his Endword to his Collected Poems of 1966). Read's 'Phases of English Poetry ' was an evolutionary study seeking to answer metaphysical rather than pragmatic questions.

Read's definitive guide to poetry however, was his Form in Modern Poetry, which he published in 1932. In 1951 literary critic A.S. Collins said of Read: "In his poetry he burnt the white ecstasy of intellect, terse poetry of austere beauty retaining much of his earliest Imagist style." A style much evident in Read's early collection Eclogues.

His Collected Poems appeared in 1946.

Prose

Dividing Read's writings on politics from those on art and culture is difficult as he saw art, culture and politics as a single congruent expression on human consciousness. His total work amounts to over 1,000 published titles.

Politically Read regarded himself as an anarchist, albeit in the English quietist tradition of Edward Carpenter and William Morris.

In his philosophical outlook, Read was close to the European idealist traditions represented by Friedrich von Schelling, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, believing that reality as it is experienced by the human mind was as much a product of the human mind as any external or objective actuality. In other words, the mind is not a camera recording the reality it perceives through the eyes; it is also a projector throwing out its own reality. This meant that art was not, as many Marxists believed, simply a product of a bourgeois society, but a psychological process that had evolved simultaneously to the evolution of consciousness. Art was, therefore, a biological phenomenon, a view that frequently pitted Read against Marxist critics such as Anthony Blunt in the 1930s. Read, in this respect, was influenced by developments in German art psychology. His Idealist background also led Read towards an interest in psychoanalysis. Read became a pioneer in the English-speaking world in the use of psychoanalysis as a tool for art and literary criticism.

Read was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner, and may have been the earliest English writer to take an interest in the writings of the French Existentialists, as early as 1949, particularly those of Jean-Paul Sartre. Although Read never described himself as an existentialist, he did acknowledge that his theories often found support among those who did. Read perhaps was the closest England came to an existentialist theorist of the European tradition.

Read was also interested in the art of writing. He cared deeply about style and structure and summarized his views in English Prose Style (1928), a primer on, and a philosophy of, good writing. The book is considered one of the best on the foundations of the English language and how those foundations can be and have been used to write English with elegance and distinction.

Critical reputation

Following his death in 1968, Read was arguably neglected due to the increasing predominance in academia of theories of art, including Marxism, which discounted his ideas. Yet his work continued to have influence. It was through Read's writings on anarchism that Murray Bookchin was inspired in the mid-1960s to explore the connections between anarchism and ecology.

In 1971, a collection of Read's writings on anarchism and politics was republished, Anarchy and Order, with an introduction by Howard Zinn. In the 1990s there was a revival of interest in him following a major exhibition in 1993 at Leeds City Art Gallery and the publication of a collection of his anarchist writings, A One-Man Manifesto, and other writings for Freedom Press, edited by David Goodway. Since then more of his work has been republished and there was a Herbert Read Conference, at Tate Britain in June 2004.

Quotations

• "Art is an attempt to create pleasing forms."
• "Theirs is the hollow victory. They are deceived.
  But you my brother and my ghost, if you can go
  Knowing that there is no reward, no certain use
  In all your sacrifice, then honour is reprieved.
  To fight without hope is to fight with grace,
  The self reconstructed, the false heart repaired."
  • To a Conscript of 1940

From To Hell with Culture

• "It is of the essence of genius to be uncommitted to any abstraction."
• "A democracy does not despise or suppress that faculty which the totalitarian socialist makes so elusive – his thinking or rational faculty. The libertarian socialist must also plan, but his plans, apart from being tentative and experimental, will make the widest use of all human faculties."
• "The libertarian planner must also remember that cities are built for citizens, and the houses and buildings will be inhabited, not by ciphers, but by human beings with sensations and feelings, and that these human beings will be unhappy unless they can freely express themselves in their environment."
• "For it is upon personal happiness that society ultimately and collectively depends."

From Poetry and Anarchism

• "In order to create it is necessary to destroy; and the agent of destruction in society is the poet. I believe that the poet is necessarily an anarchist, and that he must oppose all organized conceptions of the State, not only those which we inherit from the past, but equally those which are imposed on people in the name of the future."

Recognition

While W.B. Yeats chose many poets of the Great War generation for The Oxford Book of Modern Verse` (1936), Read arguably stood out among his peers by virtue of the 17-page excerpt (nearly half the entire work) of his 1933 book, The End of a War (Faber & Faber).

Read was knighted in 1953.

The library at the Cyprus College of Art is named after him, as is the art gallery at the University for the Creative Arts at Canterbury.

Until the 1990s the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London staged an annual Herbert Read Lecture, which included well known speakers such as Salman Rushdie.

On 11 November 1985, Read was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

Publications

Poetry

• Songs of Chaos. London: Elkin Mathews, 1915.
• Naked Warriors. London: Art & Letters, 1919.
• Auguries of Life and Death. privately published, 1919.
• Eclogues: A book of poems. London: C.W. Beaumont, 1919.
• Mutations of the Phoenix. London: Hogarth Press, 1923.
• In Retreat. London: Hogarth Press, 1925.
• Collected Poems, 1913-1925. London: Faber & Gwyer, 1926.
• The End of a War. London: Faber & Faber, 1933.
• Poems, 1914-1934. London: Faber & Faber, 1935.
• Thirty-five Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1940.
• A World Within a War. London: Faber & Faber, 1944.
• Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1946.
  • Revised editions, 1953, 1966.
• Moon's Farm. London: Faber & Faber, 1955.
• Vocal Avowals St. Gallen, Switzerland: Tschudy-Verlag, 1962.

Plays

• The Parliament of Women: A drama in three acts. Huntingdon. UK: Vine Press, 1960.
• Lord Byron at the Opera: A play for broadcasting. North Harrow, UK: Philip Ward, 1963.

Novels

• The Green Child: A romance. London: Heinemann, 1935.
• Aristotle's Mother: An imaginary conversation. North Harrow, UK: Philip Ward, 1961.

Short fiction

• Ambush. London: Faber & Faber, 1930.

Non-fiction

• Reason and Romanticism. London: Faber & Gwyer, 1926.
• English Prose Style. London: George Bell, 1928.
• Phases of English Poetry. London: Hogarth Press, 1928.
• The Sense of Glory: Essays in criticism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1929.
• Wordsworth. London: Jonathan Cape, 1930.
• Julian Benda and the New Humanism. Seattle: University of Washington, 1930.
• Essential Communism. London: S. Nott, 1935.
• In Defence of Shelley, and other essays. London: Heinemann, 1936.
• Poetry and Anarchism. London: Faber & Faber, 1938.
• Collected Essays in Literary Criticism. London: Faber & Faber, 1938.
• The Philosophy of Anarchism. London: Freedom Press Distributors, 1940.
• Annals of Innocence and Experience (essays). London: Faber & Faber, 1940.
• To Hell with Culture. London: Kegan Paul, 1941.
• Education of Free Men. London: Freedom Press, 1944.
• Anarchy and Order: Essays in politics. London: Faber & Faber, 1945.
• A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional essays. London: Routledge, 1945.
• Freedom: Is it a crime?. London: Freedom Press, 1945.
• Youth and Leisure. Peterborough, UK: Peterborough Education Board, 1947.
• Coleridge as Critic. London: Faber & Faber, 1949.
• Existentialism, Marxism, and Anarchism. London: Freedom Press, 1949.
• Education for Peace. New York: Scribner, 1949.
• Byron. London & New York: Longmans, Green, for the British Council, 1951.
• Form in Modern Poetry. London: Sheed & Ward, 1952.
• The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English romantic poetry. London: Faber & Faber, 1953.
• The Politics of the Unpolitical. London: Routledge, 1953.
• The Nature of Literature. New York: Horizon Press, 1956.
• The Tenth Muse: Essays in criticism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957.
• Truth Is More Sacred: A critical exchange on modern literature (with Edward Dahlberg). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961.
• The Contrary Experience: Autobiographies. London: Faber & Faber, 1963.
• T.S.E.: A memoir. Middletown, CT: Center for Advanced Studies, Wesleyan University, 1967.
• Poetry and Experience. London: Vision, 1967.
• The Cult of Sincerity. London: Faber & Faber, 1968.

Books on art

• English Pottery: Its developent from early times to the end of the Eighteenth Century (with Bernard Rackham). London: Ernest Benn, 1924.
• English Stained Glass. London: & New York: G.P. Putnam, 1926.
• Staffordshire Pottery Figures. London: Duckworth, 1929.
• The Meaning of Art. London: Faber & Faber, 1931.
• The Place of Art in a University. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1931.
• Form in Modern Poetry. London: Sheed & Ward, 1932.
• The Anatomy of Art: An introduction to the problems of art and aesthetics. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1932.
• Art Now: An introduction to the theory of modern painting and sculpture. London: Faber & Faber, 1933.
• The Innocent Eye. London: Faber & Faber, 1933; New York: Henry Holt & Co. Henry Holt, 1947.
• Art and Industry: The principles of industrial design. London: Faber & Faber, 1934.
• Henry Moore, Sculptor: An appreciation. London: Zwemmer, 1934.
• The Meaning of Art. London: Faber & Faber, 1935.
• Icon and Idea: The function of art in the development of human consciousness. London: Farber & Farber, 1935, 1955.
• Art and Society. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1937.
• Paul Nash. London: Soho Gallery, 1937.
• Education through Art. London: Faber & Faber, 1943.
• Paul Nash. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (Penguin Modern Painters), 1944.
• The Future of Industrial Design. London: Design & Industries Association, 1946.
• The Grass Roots of Art. London: Drummond, 1947.
• Culture and Education in World Order. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1948.
• Klee, 1879-1940. London: Faber & Faber, 1948.
• Gauguin (1848-1903). London: Faber & Faber, 1949.
• Art and the Evolution of Man: Lecture. London: Freedom Press, 1951.
• Contemporary British Art. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1951.
• Art and Sculpture. London: Faber & Faber, 1956.
• The Psychopathology of Reaction in the Arts. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1956.
• The Significance of Children's Art. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1957.
• Kandinsky (1866-1944). London: Faber & Faber, 1959.
• A Concise History of Modern Painting. London: Thames & Hudson, 1959.
• The Forms of Things Unknown: Essays towards an aesthetic philosophy. London: Faber & Faber, 1960.
• A Letter to a Young Painter. London: Thames & Hudson, 1962.
• Design and Tradition. Hemingford Grey: Vine Press, 1962.
• A Concise History of Modern Sculpture. London: Thames & Hudson, 1964.
• The Origins of Form in Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1965.
• The Styles of European Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1965.
• Henry Moore: A study of his life and work. London: Thames & Hudson, 1965.
• High Noon and Darkest Night: Some observations on Ortega y Gasset's philosophy of art. Middletown, CT: Center for Advanced Studies, Wesleyan University, 1965.
• The Redemption of the Robot: My encounter with education through art. New York: Trident Press, 1966.
• Art and Alienation: The role of the artist in society. London: Thames & Hudson, 1967.
• Arp. London: Thames & Hudson, 1968.

Collected editions

• Selected Writings: Poetry and criticism. London: Faber & Faber, 1963.

Edited

• T.E. Hulme, Notes on Language and Style. Seattle, WA: University of Washington, 1929.
• The London Book of English Prose (edited by Read & Bonamy Dobrée). London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1931.
• The English Vision: An anthology. London: Eyre & Spottiswode, 1933.
• Surrealsim London: Faber & Faber, 1936.
• The Knapsack: A pocket-book of prose and verse. London: G. Routledge, 1939.
• Petr Kropotkin, Kropotkin: Selections from his writings. London: Freedom Press, 1942.
• The London Book of English Verse (edited by Read & Bonamy Dobrée). London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1949.
• This Way Delight: A book of poetry for the young. New York: Pantheon, 1956.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy Anarchy Archives.

See also

Herbert Read "To a Conscript of 1940" Poem animation WW2

Fine Poetry - Poems of Herbert Read - Part 1

• English World War I poets
• List of British poets
• List of literary critics

References

• Goodway, David, (ed.), Herbert Read Reassessed (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998)
• King, James, Herbert Read – The Last Modern (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990)
• Paraskos, Michael, (ed.), Re-Reading Read: Critical Views on Herbert Read (London: Freedom Press, 2007)
• Read, Benedict and David Thistlewood (eds.), Herbert Read: A British Vision of World Art (London: Lund Humphries, 1993)
• Thistlewood, David, Formlessness and Form (London: Routledge, 1984)
• Weidenfeld, James King, The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read (St. Martins Press, 1990)
• Woodcock, George, Herbert Read: the Stream and the Source (London: Faber and Faber, 1972)
• Goodway, David (1998), Herbert Read Reassessed, Liverpool University Press, ISBN 978-0853238720 
• Graham, Robert (2009), Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume Two: The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939-1977), Black Rose Books, ISBN 978-1-55164-310-6 

Fonds

• Herbert Read fonds at University of Victoria, Special Collections

External links

Poems

• Herbert Read 1893-1068 at the Poetry Foundation
• "Meditation of a Dying German Officer"
• Herbert Read at Discover War Poetry (2 poems)
• Sir Herbert Read at AllPoetry (5 poems)

Books

• Herbert Read at Amazon.com

About

• Herbert Read in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Herbert Read entry at the Anarchist Encyclopedia