Herbert Edward Read Quotes

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

The process of poetry consists firstly in maintaining this vision in its integrity and secondly in expressing this vision in words.

True poetry was never speech, but always song.

All art originates in an act of intuition or vision.

The difference between poetry and prose is not one of surface qualities, or form, or mode of expression, but of essence. The state of mind in which poetry originates must either seek poetic expression or it must not be expressed.

Shakespeare shows us tradition is a meaningless abstraction for the poet itself and I give thanks for for this poet reaching after nothing more distant than the impassioned accents of its own voice as it issued from an intuitive mind.

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

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 religious movements were attempts to dragoon art to control it from a centre and to impose uniformity on it. I personally take the view, which is heterodox to most people, that the more consciously moral or political values are imposed on art, the more art suffers.

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

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 new symbolic system.

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 own origination.

Poetry is properly speaking a transcendental quality, a sudden transformation in which words assume a particular influence.

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 to call a spirit of sadism) I say: Let the war go on. It is the shortest and therefore the best way to replace the capitalist system by a democratic system, and which will at the same time rescind those partial and tyrannical solutions of the crisis represented by the Soviet Union no less than by Germany and Italy.

Kierkegaard is a new world of thought, a rare mental atmosphere in which we live dangerously, as many people have already discovered at the cost of their complacency. .... To begin reading Kierkegaard is to embark on a long journey, a journey which will be difficult and dangerous, but with such a reward at the end that all the incidental pain will be immediately forgotten. Kierkegaard’s life was in every sense that of a saint. He is perhaps the most real saint of modern times. p. 251-252, 255

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,