Herbert Read
Encyclopedia
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
.
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
. 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
.
and of the Metaphysical poets
, 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.
, 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.
From 1953–54 Read served as the Norton Professor at Harvard University
. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism
, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner
.
and William Morris
. Nevertheless in 1953 he accepted a knight
hood for "services to literature".
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.
was inspired in the mid-1960s to explore the connections between anarchism and ecology. In 1971, a collection of his 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. 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. 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."
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:
Distinguished Service Order
The Distinguished Service Order is a military decoration of the United Kingdom, and formerly of other parts of the British Commonwealth and Empire, awarded for meritorious or distinguished service by officers of the armed forces during wartime, typically in actual combat.Instituted on 6 September...
, MC
Military Cross
The Military Cross is the third-level military decoration awarded to officers and other ranks of the British Armed Forces; and formerly also to officers of other Commonwealth countries....
(1893–1968) was an English anarchist
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
, poet, and critic of literature and art. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner
Max Stirner
Johann Kaspar Schmidt , better known as Max Stirner , was a German philosopher, who ranks as one of the literary fathers of nihilism, existentialism, post-modernism and anarchism, especially of individualist anarchism...
.
Early life
He was born in KirkbymoorsideKirkbymoorside
Kirkbymoorside is a small market town and civil parish in the Ryedale district of North Yorkshire, England which lies approximately 25 miles north of York midway between Pickering and Helmsley, and has a population of approximately 3,000.-History:...
in the North Riding of Yorkshire
North Riding of Yorkshire
The North Riding of Yorkshire was one of the three historic subdivisions of the English county of Yorkshire, alongside the East and West Ridings. From the Restoration it was used as a Lieutenancy area. The three ridings were treated as three counties for many purposes, such as having separate...
. His studies at the University of Leeds
University of Leeds
The University of Leeds is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England...
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
Military Cross
The Military Cross is the third-level military decoration awarded to officers and other ranks of the British Armed Forces; and formerly also to officers of other Commonwealth countries....
and the Distinguished Service Order
Distinguished Service Order
The Distinguished Service Order is a military decoration of the United Kingdom, and formerly of other parts of the British Commonwealth and Empire, awarded for meritorious or distinguished service by officers of the armed forces during wartime, typically in actual combat.Instituted on 6 September...
, and reached the rank of Captain. During the war Read founded the journal Arts and Letters with Frank Rutter
Frank Rutter
Francis Vane Phipson Rutter was a British art critic, curator and activist.In 1903, he became art critic for The Sunday Times, a position which he held for the rest of his life...
, one of the first literary periodicals to publish work by T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
. 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
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...
.
Early work
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 ImagismImagism
Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets,...
and of the Metaphysical poets
Metaphysical poets
The metaphysical poets is a term coined by the poet and critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of British lyric poets of the 17th century, who shared an interest in metaphysical concerns and a common way of investigating them, and whose work was characterized by inventiveness of metaphor...
, was mainly in free verse
Free verse
Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form...
. His Collected Poems appeared in 1946. As a critic of literature, Read mainly concerned himself with the English Romantic poets
Romantic poetry
Romanticism, a philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural era which began in the mid/late-1700s as a reaction against the prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the day , also influenced poetry...
(e.g., The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry, 1953). He published a novel, The Green Child
The Green Child
The Green Child is the only completed novel by the English anarchist poet and critic Herbert Read. Written in 1934 and first published by Heinemann in 1935, the story is based on the 12th-century legend of two green children who mysteriously appeared in the English village of Woolpit, speaking an...
. He contributed to the Criterion
The Criterion (magazine)
The Criterion was a British literary magazine published from October 1922 to January 1939. The Criterion was, for most of its run, a quarterly journal, although for a period in 1927-28 it was published monthly. It was created by the poet, dramatist, and literary critic T. S...
(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.
Art criticism
Read was (and remains) better known as an art critic. He was a champion of modern British artists such as Paul NashPaul Nash (artist)
Paul Nash was a British landscape painter, surrealist and war artist, as well as a book-illustrator, writer and designer of applied art. He was the older brother of the artist John Nash.-Early life:...
, Ben Nicholson
Ben Nicholson
Benjamin Lauder "Ben" Nicholson, OM was a British painter of abstract compositions , landscape and still-life.-Background and Training:...
, Henry Moore
Henry Moore
Henry Spencer Moore OM CH FBA was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art....
and Barbara Hepworth
Barbara Hepworth
Dame Barbara Hepworth DBE was an English sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism, and with such contemporaries as Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo she helped to develop modern art in Britain.-Life and work:Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was born on 10 January 1903 in Wakefield,...
. He became associated with Nash's contemporary arts group Unit One. Read was professor of fine arts at the University of Edinburgh
University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...
(1931–33) and editor of the trend-setting Burlington Magazine (1933–38). He was one of the organisers of the London International Surrealist Exhibition
London International Surrealist Exhibition
The International Surrealist Exhibition was held from 11 June to 4 July 1936 at the New Burlington Galleries in London, England.The exhibition was organised by:* Hugh Sykes Davies* David Gascoyne* Humphrey Jennings* Rupert Lee* Diana Brinton Lee...
in 1936 and editor of the book Surrealism, published in 1936, which included contributions from André Breton
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
, Hugh Sykes Davies
Hugh Sykes Davies
Hugh Sykes Davies was an English poet, novelist and communist who was one of a small group of 1930s British surrealists.Davies was born in Yorkshire to a Methodist minister and his wife. He went to Kingswood School, Bath and studied at Cambridge, where he co-edited a student magazine called...
, Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
, and Georges Hugnet
Georges Hugnet
Georges Hugnet , was a French poet, writer, artist, art historian, graphic artist, and film director. He was a figure in the Dada movement and Surrealism.-References:...
. He also served as a trustee of the Tate Gallery
Tate Gallery
The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...
and as a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum (1922–1939), as well as co-founding the Institute of Contemporary Arts
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Institute of Contemporary Arts is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. It is located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch...
with Roland Penrose
Roland Penrose
Sir Roland Algernon Penrose CBE was an English artist, historian and poet. He was a major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the surrealists in the United Kingdom.- Biography :...
in 1947.
From 1953–54 Read served as the Norton Professor at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner
Max Stirner
Johann Kaspar Schmidt , better known as Max Stirner , was a German philosopher, who ranks as one of the literary fathers of nihilism, existentialism, post-modernism and anarchism, especially of individualist anarchism...
.
Anarchism and philosophical outlook
Politically Read regarded himself as an anarchist, albeit in the English quietist tradition of Edward CarpenterEdward Carpenter
Edward Carpenter was an English socialist poet, socialist philosopher, anthologist, and early gay activist....
and William Morris
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
. Nevertheless in 1953 he accepted a knight
Knight
A knight was a member of a class of lower nobility in the High Middle Ages.By the Late Middle Ages, the rank had become associated with the ideals of chivalry, a code of conduct for the perfect courtly Christian warrior....
hood for "services to literature".
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
Routledge
Routledge is a British publishing house which has operated under a succession of company names and latterly as an academic imprint. Its origins may be traced back to the 19th-century London bookseller George 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
Eric Gill
Arthur Eric Rowton Gill was a British sculptor, typeface designer, stonecutter and printmaker, who was associated with the Arts and Crafts movement...
.
In his philosophical outlook, Read was close to the European idealist traditions represented by Friedrich von Schelling, Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher. He was one of the founding figures of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, a movement that developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant...
, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
, 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
Anthony Blunt
Anthony Frederick Blunt , was a British art historian who was exposed as a Soviet spy late in his life.Blunt was Professor of the History of Art at the University of London, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, Surveyor of the King's Pictures and London...
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
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
. 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
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
. 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.
Death and legacy
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 BookchinMurray Bookchin
Murray Bookchin was an American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher. A pioneer in the ecology movement, Bookchin was the founder of the social ecology movement within anarchist, libertarian socialist and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books on politics,...
was inspired in the mid-1960s to explore the connections between anarchism and ecology. In 1971, a collection of his writings on anarchism and politics was republished, Anarchy and Order, with an introduction by Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn was an American historian, academic, author, playwright, and social activist. Before and during his tenure as a political science professor at Boston University from 1964-88 he wrote more than 20 books, which included his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United...
. 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
Tate Britain
Tate Britain is an art gallery situated on Millbank in London, and part of the Tate gallery network in Britain, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, opening in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner.-History:It...
in June 2004. The library at the Cyprus College of Art
Cyprus College of Art
The Cyprus College of Art is a post-secondary art instutution located in the Mediterranean island of, Cyprus.-Academics:CyCA offers beginner courses in art, university-entrance programmes in art and design, bachelor degree equivalent programmes in Fine Art , and Master of Fine Art degrees at...
is named after him, as is the art gallery at the University for the Creative Arts at Canterbury
Canterbury
Canterbury is a historic English cathedral city, which lies at the heart of the City of Canterbury, a district of Kent in South East England. It lies on the River Stour....
. Until the 1990s the Institute of Contemporary Arts
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Institute of Contemporary Arts is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. It is located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch...
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
Westminster Abbey
The Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster, popularly known as Westminster Abbey, is a large, mainly Gothic church, in the City of Westminster, London, United Kingdom, located just to the west of the Palace of Westminster. It is the traditional place of coronation and burial site for English,...
's Poet's Corner. The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC was an English poet and soldier, one of the leading poets of the First World War...
. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."
He was the father of the well-known writer Piers Paul Read
Piers Paul Read
Piers Paul Read, FRSL is a British novelist and non-fiction writer.-Background:Read was born in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire...
, the BBC documentary maker John Read
John Read (art film maker)
John Read was a documentary film maker for the BBC from 1951 to 1983.-Biography:John Read was born in Purley, Surrey, in 1923, the son of the art critic Herbert Read and Evelyn Roff. The family moved to Scotland in 1931 when Herbert took up the position of Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art at...
, and the art historian Ben Read.
Quotes and excerpts
- "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."
Selected bibliography
- Arp (The World of Art Library) (1968)
- Art and Alienation (1967)
- My Anarchism (1966)
- Unit One (1966), editor
- To Hell With Culture (1963)
- Eric Gill (1963)
- Introduction to Hubris: A Study of Pride by Pierre Stephen Robert PaynePierre Stephen Robert PaynePierre Stephen Robert Payne , was a novelist, historian, poet, and biographer.Born in Cornwall, the son of an English naval architect, and with a French mother. He worked as a shipbuilder and then for a time with the Inland Revenue. In 1941 he became an armament officer and chief camouflage...
(1960) - The Tenth Muse (1957)
- Icon and Idea (1955)
- Education Through Art (1954)
- Revolution & Reason (1953)
- The Art of Sculpture (1951)
- Education for Peace (1950)
- Existentialism, Marxism and Anarchism, Chains of Freedom (1949)
- Art and Society (1945)
- Education Through Art (1943)
- The Paradox of Anarchism (1941)
- Philosophy of Anarchism (1940)
- Anarchy & Order; Poetry & Anarchism (1938)
- Collected Essays in Literary Criticism (1938)
- The Grass Roots of Art (1937)
- The Green ChildThe Green ChildThe Green Child is the only completed novel by the English anarchist poet and critic Herbert Read. Written in 1934 and first published by Heinemann in 1935, the story is based on the 12th-century legend of two green children who mysteriously appeared in the English village of Woolpit, speaking an...
(1935) - Art and Industry (1934)
- Art Now (1933)
- Wordsworth (1932)
- English Prose Style (1931)
- Naked Warriors (1919)
Further reading
- Goodway, David, (ed.), Herbert Read Reassessed (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998)
- King, James, The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990)
- Paraskos, Michael, (ed.)Michael ParaskosMichael Paraskos, FRSA a writer on art, the son of the Cypriot artist Stass Paraskos. He has written several books, essays and articles on art, literature and politics, and has taught in universities and colleges and curated several exhibitions...
, 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)
- Woodcock, GeorgeGeorge WoodcockGeorge Woodcock was a Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic. He was also a poet, and published several volumes of travel writing. He founded in 1959 the journal Canadian Literature, the first academic journal specifically...
, Herbert Read: the Stream and the Source (London: Faber and Faber, 1972) - Herbert Read: A Memorial Symposium by Robin SkeltonRobin SkeltonRobin Skelton was a British-born academic, writer, poet, and anthologist.Born in Easington, Yorkshire, Skelton was educated at the University of Leeds and Cambridge University. From 1944 to 1947, he served with the Royal Air Force in India. He later taught at Manchester University...
(London: Methuen, 1970)
External links
- Herbert Read entry at the Anarchist Encyclopedia
- Herbert Read fonds at University of Victoria, Special Collections
- The Paradox of Anarchism (1941)