READ, SIR HERBERT

born Dec. 4, 1893, Muscoates Grange, Kirbymoorside, Yorkshire [now Kirkbymoorside, North Yorkshire], Eng. died June 12, 1968, Malton, Yorkshire [now in North Yorkshire] poet and critic who was the chief advocate and interpreter of modern art movements in Great Britain from the 1930s. His critical scrutiny embraced society, art, and literature from the point of view of a philosophic anarchist. Read grew up on a farm, and he described his childhood in The Innocent Eye (1933), incorporated with other autobiographical writings in The Contrary Experiences (1963). After working in a bank, he went to the University of Leeds. He served for three years as an infantry officer during World War I. War and his lost childhood appear often as themes in his several volumes of poetry, beginning with Naked Warriors (1919); his first Collected Poems was published in 1926, his last in 1966. He was an important influence among a group of poets of the 1940s known as the New Apocalypse, who reacted against the political and cerebral poetry of the 1930s. Read became an assistant keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, after World War I, taught at the University of Edinburgh (193132), and edited the Burlington Magazine (193339). He lived in London in the 1930s near the artists and sculptors Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Ben Nicholson, and his interest helped establish their work. Writing, teaching, and work in publishing occupied his later years. He was knighted in 1953. Important to Read's theories of art and literature is the distinction that he first made in Form in Modern Poetry (1932) between organic and abstract form. He favoured the organic, which takes shape to meet the needs of a particular expression, rather than abstract form, superimposed on a given content. Read's many critical works include Art Now (1933, rev. ed. 1936, 1948), Art and Industry (1934), Art and Society (1936), Education Through Art (1943), and The Philosophy of Modern Art (1952). His The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry (1953) revived the reputation of the Romantic poets. Read's emphasis on the importance of art in learning influenced British education, and his support of functionalism left its impress on British design. The Contrary Experience: The Autobiography of Herbert Read was published posthumously in 1974.