Herbert Read
Herbert Read
Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MCwas an English art historian, poet, literary critic and philospher, best known for numerous books on art, which included influential volumes on the role of art in education. Read was co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
art social-values giving
Art is not and never has been subordinate to moral values. Moral values are social values; aesthetic values are human values. Morality seeks to restrain the feelings; art seeks to define them by externalizing them, by giving them significant form. Morality has only one aim - the ideal good; art has quite another aim - the objective truth... art never changes.
real mean writing
Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression. ... by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking. ... There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.
real goal simplicity
Simplicity is not a goal, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, as one approaches the real meaning of things.
art personality host
Art in its widest sense is the extension of the personality: a host of artificial limbs.
war wish purpose
It is not my purpose as a poet to condemn war (or to be exact, modern warfare). I only wish to present the universal aspects of a particular event
art real men
In a sense, every tool is a machine--the hammer, the ax, and the chisel. And every machine is a tool. The real distinction is between one man using a tool with his hands and producing an object that shows at every stage the direction of his will and the impression of his personality; and a machine which is producing, without the intervention of a particular man, objects of a uniformity and precision that show no individual variation and have no personal charm. The problem is to decide whether the objects of machine production can possess the essential qualities of art.
art contemplation persist
Works of art must persist as objects of contemplation.
thinking imagination mind
Fantasy is a product of thought, Imagination of sensibility. If the thinking, discursive mind turns to speculation, the result isFantasy; if, however, the sensitive, intuitive mind turns to speculation, the result is Imagination. Fantasy may be visionary, but it is cold and logical. Imagination is sensuous and instinctive. Both have form, but the form of Fantasy is analogous to Exposition, that of Imagination to Narrative.
art men giving
Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography.
song speech use
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.
fall gay men
It will be a gay world. There will be lights everywhere except in the minds of men, and the fall of the last civilization will not be heard above the din.
life art patterns
Art is pattern informed by sensibility.
life literature dull
If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical.
art desire inspired
In general, modern art... has been inspired by a natural desire to chart the uncharted.