Herbert Read

Sir Herbert Edward Read (4 December 1893 – 12 June 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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What is a poetry

• The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech..For true poetry is never speech but always a song.

End Word Collected Poems Faber & Faber London 1966

• Poetry is creative expression..by creative I mean original..which raises the question how are we to recognise originality when we see it..it is an instinctive matter.
• Poetry is a mental activity in which there is no time interval between the words and the thought..and it mat inhere in a single word or phrase.

English Prose Style G Bell& Son London 1928

The Cult of Sincerity (1969)

• Sentir mon Cœur is a privilege only granted to the exceptional man—the one who has the ability to find words that exactly (or, to himself, convincingly) express his feelings. … The value of words help to define the feeling itself. … The common failure is to allow habitual words and phrases, flowing spontaneously from the memory, to determine and deform the feelings.
  • p. 16

• Why do we forget our childhood? With rare exceptions we have no memory of our first four, five, or six years, and yet we have only to watch the development of our own children during this period to realize that these are precisely the most exciting, the most formative years of life. Schachtel’s theory is that our infantile experiences, so free, so uninhibited, are suppressed because they are incompatible with the conventions of an adult society which we call ‘civilized’. The infant is a savage and must be tamed, domesticated. The process is so gradual and so universal that only exceptionally will an individual child escape it, to become perhaps a genius, perhaps the selfish individual we call a criminal. The significance of this theory for the problem of sincerity in art (and in life) is that occasionally the veil of forgetfulness that hides our infant years is lifted and then we recover all the force and vitality that distinguished our first experiences—the ‘celestial joys’ of which Traherne speaks, when the eyes feast for the first time and insatiably on the beauties of God’s creation. Those childhood experiences, when we ‘enjoy the World aright’, are indeed sincere, and we may therefore say that we too are sincere when in later years we are able to recall these innocent sensations.
  • pp. 16-17

• These are the sensations and feelings that are gradually blunted by education, staled by custom, rejected in favor of social conformity.
  • [referring to the curiosity and sense of wonder of the child] p. 17

• Once we become conscious of a feeling and attempt to make a corresponding form, we are engaged in an activity which, far from being sincere, is prepared (as any artist if he is sincere will tell you) to moderate feelings to fit the form. The artist’s feeling for form is stronger than a formless feeling.
  • p. 18

• The work of art ... is an instrument for tilling the human psyche, that it may continue to yield a harvest of vital beauty.
  • p. 20

Other

• 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.
  • Poetry and Anarchism