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Sir Herbert Edward Read (1893-1968) | |
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English poet, critic, and prolific essayist, a philosophical anarchist and outspoken pacifist during World War II. Read published over sixty books, of which a considerable number is still in print. In the 1950s Read's reputation placed him alongside such figures as T.S. Eliot and George Orwell. "The only sin is ugliness, and if we believed this with all our being, all other activities of the human spirit could be left to take care of themselves. That is why I believe that art is so much more significant than either economics or philosophy. It is the direct measure of man's spiritual vision." (from The Meaning of Art, 1968) Herbert Read was born in Kirbymoorside, North Riding of Yorkshire. He descended from a long line of yeoman farmer. spent His first ten years Read on the farm. After his father died, he was sent to a school for orphans in Halifax. At the age of sixteen, he started to work as a clerk in the Leeds Savings Bank. Through evening study, he was able to enter the University of Leeds, where he studied from 1911 to 1914. As a poet Read made his debut with Songs of Chaos (1915). It connected him with the Imagists, who believed that a hard, clear image was essential to verse. However, Read's poems were seldom typical for the movement, and his early career was cut short by the First World War. He served three years in the army, fighting in France and Belgium. In 1917 he was promoted to captain and in 1918 he received the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order. During the war, Read founded with Frank Rutter the journal Arts and Letters, which attacked conservative values and published texts by such writers as Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot. After demobilization, Read worked as an assistant principal of the Treasury, London. From 1922 to 1931 he was the assistant keeper of ceramics and stained glass at Victoria and Albert Museum. In London literary life, Read become a close friend of T.S. Eliot; they had first met in 1917. He contributed to the Criterion (1922-39) and he was many years a regular art critic for the Listener. He also edited various anthologies and works by T.E. Hulme, A.R. Orage, Kropotkin, and C.G.Jung. Read's first major work of literary criticism was Reason and Romanticism (1926), in which he started his lifelong wrestling between the antiromantic 'reason' and 'classicism' and the claims of 'emotion'. He was the editor of the Burlington Magazine (1933-39), succeeding Fry, and from 1940 an editor of English Master Painters series. From the 1930s Read held various academic and also devoted much of his time to public affairs and art administration. In 1933 he helped organize the Unit 1 exhibition of contemporary art and the surrealist exhibition of 1936. Read frequently championed new artistic movements, earning an international reputation as a defender of modern art. Especially his writings about the sculptor Henry Moore had a great influence upon Anglo-American taste. Read was a professor of fine art at Edinburgh University from 1931 to 1933, a lecturer in art at the University of Liverpool (1935-36), Leon Fellow at University of London (1940-42), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1953-54). After World War II Read cofounded the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London. "The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol. The symbol, by its nature, is only intelligible to the initiated (though it may still appeal mysteriously to the uninitiated, so long as they allow it to enter their unconscious). The people can only understand the image, and even this they distrust in its eidetic purity, for even their vision is conventional. It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved. But both may wear the cloak of humanism, the one for shelter, the other for display. The sensitive artist knows that a bitter wind is blowing." (from The Philosophy of Modern Art, 1952) In a series of books, such as The Meaning of Art (1930), Art Now (1933), and Art and Society (1937) Read argued for 'organic form' and the need for art in education. Read had adopted ideas from Freud, Jung, Hegel, Schiller, and Marx. He had developed disgust for the ugliness of industrialism, and denied that there is a "necessary connection between beauty and function". English Prose Style (1928) reflected his disillusionment with the post-war era and its false splendors. Read praised the the virtues of simplicity, even if it was often dry and flat - at least it conveyed a feeling of truthfulness. In Poetry and Anarchism (1938) Read abandoned his earlier adherence to Marxist socialism, which was a disappointment for his leftist friends. Read was one of the earliest to practice psychoanalytical criticism. In Collected Essays in Literary Criticism (1938) he saw depth psychology necessary for understanding literary creation. "I would say myself that there is no real contradiction between art, conceived as design, and the unconscious. The unconscious does, in fact, reveal design. Not only is the dream, when understood. a dramatic unity, but even in its plastic manifestations the unconscious possesses a principle of organization." Although Read wrote his essays in an accessible, often didactic style, his poetry was deemed inaccessible by some critics. Read used striking images and complicated patterns of thought, the tone is meditative or dramatic. Among his best works are 'The Analysis of Love' (1923), 'The End of a War' (1933), and ' 'A World within a War' (1943). His Collected Poems (1946) influenced the 'New Apocalypse' poets of the 1940s. Read's allegorical, fantastic novel The Green Child (1935), about a journey through the self, is considered his most notable prose work. In the story the hero rescues a green-skinned woman from her sadistic husband. She leads him back to her world via the millstream from wich she emerged. His last years Read lived at Stonegrave house, Yorkshire, near to where he had been born. He was knighted in 1953 by Winston Churchill "for services to literature." Read received several awards, including Erasmus Prize (1966) for contributions to European culture. He was president of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, president of the British Society of Aesthetics, and trustee of the Tate Gallery, among other positions. Read died on June 12, 1968. He was married two times, with Evelyn Roff and Margaret Ludwig; they had one daughter and four sons, one of whom is the well known novelist Piers Paul Read. For further reading: Herbert Read Reassessed, ed. by David Goodway (1998); Herbert Read, ed. by David Goodway (1997); Herbert Read, ed. by B. Read and D. Thistlewood (1993); The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read by James King (1990); Herbert Read by David Thistlewood (1984); Wenn die Kunst stirbt by Wilhelm Hortmann (1976); Herbert Read by George Woodcock (1972); A Certain Order by W. Harder (1971); Herbert Read, ed. by Robin Skelton (1970); Herbert Read, ed. by Henry Treece (1969); A Checklist of the Herbert Read Archive by H. Gerwing and M.W. Pidgeon (1969); Herbert Read by F. Berry (1953) - For further information: Herbert Read - The Happy Warrior - Selected works:
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