Quotes by Herbert Read

“To stop the war, besides being a futile gesture, would leave the crisis unresolved. It would postpone the necessity of a solution. Therefore, in a spirit of fatalism (which my opponents are welcome...”

“The aesthetic canons of Puritanism or Iconoclasm have little relevance to the facts of art, in so far as these facts are an expression of the diversity of human creatures. Like Fascism today, those...”

“The politics of the unpolitical—these are the politics of those who desire to be pure in heart: the politics of men without personal ambition; of those who have not desires wealth or an unequal sha...”

“The modern world has largely forgotten, and our educational systems ignore, the primary importance, in the evolution of man, of various types of symbolic communication—the communication embodied in...”

“What I am searching for... is some formula that would combine individual initiative with universal values, and that combination would give us a truly organic form. Form, which we discover in nature...”

“War, as Rousseau pointed out long before Tolstoy took up the theme, only makes manifest events already determined by moral causes (Emile,Bk. IV). For this reason our main energies must be directed ...”

“The revolutionary artist is born into a world of clichés, of stale images and signs which no longer pierce the consciousness to express reality. He therefore invents new symbols, perhaps a whole ne...”

“Poetry, we might say, is concerned with the truth of what is, not with what is truth.”

“The poem, even when it has some predetermined pattern, must be wrought to some effect or finish that justifies the exclamation: This is a poem!”

“True poetry was never speech, but always song.”

“A poem therefore is to be defined as a structure of words whose sound constitutes a rhythmical unity, complete in itself, irrefragable, unanalyzable, completing its symbolic references within the a...”

“A poem is not a statement, but a manifestation, a manifestation of being”

“The words in a poem, (or more exactly, syllables) are vocal signs that convey an intangible essence (the pattern of feeling) that vanishes the moment we approach it with an analytical intelligence.”

“The rhythm of a poem ceases the moment the feeling loses its intensity.”

“The modern poet is above all things honest. He does not write for fame nor for money. He merely writes to vent his own spleen, his own bitterness. His own sense of disparity between the ugliness of...”

“There is no beauty in anything rational. Beauty emerges from the unknown, often from the inane, generally irrational, as unforseen combinations.”

“English Poetry has come full circle from the widest public appeal, the communal poetry of ballads to the narrowest possible , in the present day as the poet addresses himself.”

“All art originates in an act of intuition or vision.”

“Words,their sound and even their very appearance, are, of course,everything to the poet.”

“The school of art which Hulme started and Pound established .. diction ,rhythm and metre were fully emancipated from formal artifice and the poet was free to act creatively under the laws of his ow...”