Herbert Edward Read

Herbert Edward Read studied at University of Leeds. The recorded working language is English and British English. Employment is recorded with Harvard University, Wesleyan University and University of Edinburgh. Positions recorded include teacher. Works named in the authority record are Education Through Art and A Concise history of modern painting. Work by Herbert Edward Read is recorded in the collections of Minneapolis Institute of Art. Distinctions recorded are Distinguished Service Order, Military Cross, Erasmus Prize and Knight Bachelor.

The eldest of four children of tenant farmer Herbert Edward Read (1868–1903) and his wife Eliza Strickland, Read was born at Muscoates Grange,[2] near Nunnington, about four miles south of Kirkbymoorside in the North Riding of Yorkshire. In Herbert Read- The Stream and the Source (1972), George Woodcock wrote: "rural memories are long... nearly sixty years after Read's father... had died and the family had left Muscoates, I heard it said that 'the Reads were snobs'. They employed a governess (and) rode to hounds..."[3] After his father's death, the family, being tenants rather than owners, had to leave the farm; Read was sent to a school for orphans at Halifax, West Yorkshire,[4] and his mother took a job managing laundry in Leeds, where Read later joined her.[6] Read's 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 was commissioned in January 1915,[7] and received both the Military Cross (MC) and the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) "for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty" in 1918.[8][9] He reached the rank of captain.[10] During the war, Read founded the journal Arts & Letters with Frank Rutter, one of the first literary periodicals to publish work by T. S. Eliot.[11]

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 the Metaphysical poets,[12] was mainly in free verse. His Collected Poems[13] appeared in 1946. As a critic of literature, Read mainly concerned himself with the English Romantic poets (for example, The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry, 1953) but was also a close observer of imagism.[14] He published a novel, The Green Child. He contributed to the Criterion (1922–39) and he was for many years a regular art critic for The Listener.[15] 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 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 summarised his views in English Prose Style (1928),[16] 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's conception of poetry was influenced by his mentors T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, Marianne Moore and W. C. 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.[18] Read's definitive guide to poetry however, was his Form in Modern Poetry, which he published in 1932.[19] 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."[20] This style was evident in Read's earliest collection, Eclogues 1914-18.[21]

Read developed a strong interest in the subject of education and particularly in art education. Read's anarchism was influenced by William Godwin, Peter Kropotkin and Max Stirner. Read "became deeply interested in children's drawings and paintings after having been invited to collect works for an exhibition of British art that would tour allied and neutral countries during the Second World War. As it was considered too risky to transport across the Atlantic works of established importance to the national heritage, it was proposed that children’s drawings and paintings should be sent instead. Read, in making his collection, was unexpectedly moved by the expressive power and emotional content of some of the younger artists' works. The experience prompted his special attention to their cultural value, and his engagement of the theory of children's creativity with seriousness matching his devotion to the avant-garde. This work both changed fundamentally his own life's work throughout his remaining 25 years and provided art education with a rationale of unprecedented lucidity and persuasiveness. Key books and pamphlets resulted: Education through Art (Read, 1943); The Education of Free Men (Read, 1944); Culture and Education in a World Order (Read, 1948); The Grass Read, (1955); and Redemption of the Robot (1966).[30]

• Ecologue: A Book of Poems (1919) • Naked Warriors (1919) • What is a Poem (1926) • English Prose Style (1928) • Phases of English Poetry (1928) • Wordsworth; The Clark Lectures 1929-30 (1930) • In Retreat (1930) • Ambush (1931) • Arp (1931) 'the World of Art Library' series • The Meaning of Art (1931) revised 1968 • Art and Alienation (1932) • Form in Modern Poetry (1932) • Innocent Eye (1933) childhood autobiography • The Redemption of the Robot: My Encounter with Education through Art (1933) • Art Now (1933) • Art and Industry (1934) • My Anarchism (1934) • The Green Child (1935) • Unit One (1935) editor • Paul Nash. A Portfolio of Colour Plates (1937) introduction • Eric Gill (1938) • Introduction to Hubris: A Study of Pride by Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (1940) • The Tenth Muse (1941) • To Hell With Culture (1941) • A World Within A War (1943) • Education Through Art (1943) later revised • Icon and Idea (1943) • Revolution & Reason (1945) • The Art of Sculpture (1949) • Education for Peace (1950) • Existentialism, Marxism and Anarchism, Chains of Freedom (1951) • English Prose Style (Reprinted 1952) • Art and Society (1953) • The True Voice of Feeling (1953) • The Paradox of Anarchism (1955) • Philosophy of Anarchism (1957) • A Concise History of Modern Painting (1959) 'the World of Art Library' series • Anarchy & Order; Poetry & Anarchism (1959) • Collected Essays in Literary Criticism (1960) • The Grass Roots of Art (1963) • Art Now (1963) • The Contrary Experience: Autobiographies (1963) autobiography • A Concise History of Modern Sculpture (1964) 'the World of Art Library' series • Collected Poems (1966) • Wordsworth (1966) • Naked Warriors (Reprinted 1967) • Art and Alienation (1967) • Essays in Literary Criticism (1969)

The authorities additionally record the headings Sir Herbert Edward Read, Herbert Read and Sir Herbert Read. His recorded languages were English and British English. He married Margaret Read. 3 children are recorded: Piers Paul Read, John Read and Benedict Read.

He was employed by Harvard University, Wesleyan University and University of Edinburgh. Recorded position is teacher. He belonged to Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten and Yorkshire Philosophical Society.

Herbert Edward Read is recorded as having received Distinguished Service Order, Military Cross and Erasmus Prize.

Read 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 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 (1922–31), 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, one of the forerunners of nihilism, psychoanalytic theory, postmodernism, individualist anarchism, and egoism. From 1953 to 1954 Read served as the Norton Professor at Harvard University. In that final year, he gave the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art. For the academic year 1964–65 and again in 1965, he was a Fellow on the faculty at the Center for Advanced Studies of Wesleyan University.[17]

• Illustration — Herbert Read in 1966 Following his death in 1968, Read was probably 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.[31] In 1971, a collection of his writings on anarchism and politics was republished, Anarchy and Order, with an introduction by Howard Zinn.[32] 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.[33] 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 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.[34] The inscription on the stone was taken from Wilfred Owen's "Preface" to his poems and reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."[35] A 1937 reading by Read lasting seven minutes and titled The Surrealist Object can be heard on the audiobook CD Surrealism Reviewed, published in 2002.[36] He was the father of the well-known writer Piers Paul Read, the BBC documentary maker John Read, the BBC producer and executive Tom Read, and the art historian Ben Read.