Herbert Read

Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC (/riːd/; 4 December 1893 – 12 June 1968) was an English art historian, poet, literary critic and philosopher, 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. As well as being a prominent English anarchist, he was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism. He was co-editor with Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler of the British edition in English of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.

He was a professor of fine art at Edinburgh University from 1931 to 1933, a lecturer in art at the University of Liverpool (1935-36), Leon Fellow at University of London (1940-42), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University (1953-54).

The eldest of four children of tenant farmer Herbert Edward Read (1868–1903) and his wife Eliza Strickland, Read was born at Muscoates Grange, 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..." 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, and his mother took a job managing laundry in Leeds, where Read later joined her. 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, and received both the Military Cross (MC) and the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) "for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty" in 1918. He reached the rank of captain.

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.

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, 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 (for example, The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry, 1953) but was also a close observer of imagism. 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.

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 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 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.