Herbert Edward Read Quotes

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

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

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.

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

All art originates in an act of intuition or vision.

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.

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

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 the world that is and the beauty of the world that might be.

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

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.

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

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 ambit of its sound effects.

True poetry was never speech, but always song.

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!

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