| Herbert Read | |
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Herbert Read, 1958 |
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| Born | 4 December 1893 Kirkbymoorside, North Riding of Yorkshire |
| Died | 12 June 1968 (aged 74) Stonegrave, North Riding of Yorkshire |
| Occupation | Anarchist poet, modern art historian, and literary & art critic |
| Nationality | English |
| Period | 1915–1968 |
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Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC (1893–1968) was an English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner.
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He 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 the journal Arts and Letters with Frank Rutter, one of the first literary periodicals to publish work by T. S. Eliot.[1]
Read's first volume of poetry was Songs of Chaos, self-published in 1915. His second 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 and of the Metaphysical poets[2], was mainly in free verse. His Collected Poems appeared in 1946. 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.
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 seventeen-page excerpt (nearly half of the entire work) of his The End of a War (Faber & Faber, 1933).
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.
Read was (and remains) better known as an art critic. 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 the trend-setting Burlington Magazine (1933–38). He was one of the organisers 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. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner.
From 1953–54 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.[3]
Politically Read regarded himself as an anarchist, albeit in the English quietist tradition of Edward Carpenter and William Morris. Nevertheless in 1953 he accepted a knighthood for "services to literature";[4] this caused Read to be ostracized by most of the anarchist movement. [5] Read was actively opposed to the Franco regime in Spain, and often campaigned on behalf of political prisoners in Spain. [6]
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.
To Hell With Culture was republished by Routledge in 2002 and deals specifically with Read's disdain for the term culture and expands on his anarchist view of the artist as artisan, as well as presenting a major analysis of the work of Eric Gill.
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 probably the first 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.[7]
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.[8] In 1971, a collection of his writings on anarchism and politics was republished, Anarchy and Order, with an introduction by Howard Zinn.[9] 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.[10] Since then more of his work has been republished and there was a Herbert Read Conference, at Tate Britain in June 2004. 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 sixteen Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.[11] 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."[12]
He was the father of the well-known writer Piers Paul Read, the BBC documentary maker John Read, and the art historian Ben Read.
From To Hell with Culture:
From Poetry and Anarchism: