Herbert Read quotes - page 3

True poetry was never speech, but always song. (Herbert Read)
The distinction between a major and minor poet is the ability to write a long poem successfully. View quote
Herbert Read
There is no beauty in anything rational. Beauty emerges from the unknown, often from the inane, generally irrational, as unforseen combinations. View quote
Herbert Read
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 share of worldly possessions; of those who have always striven, whatever their race or condition, for human values and not for national or sectional interests. For our Western world, Christ is the supreme example of this unselfish devotion to the good of humanity, and the Sermon on the Mount is the source of all the politics of the unpolitical. View quote
Herbert Read
Poetry is properly speaking a transcendental quality, a sudden transformation in which words assume a particular influence. View quote
Herbert Read
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. View quote
Herbert Read
The process of poetry consists firstly in maintaining this vision in its integrity and secondly in expressing this vision in words. View quote
Herbert Read
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. View quote
Herbert Read
A poem is not a statement, but a manifestation, a manifestation of being. View quote
Herbert Read
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. View quote
Herbert Read
Poetry, we might say, is concerned with the truth of what is, not with what is truth. (Herbert Read)
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. View quote
Herbert Read
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 gesture, ritual, dance, music myth, and poetic metaphor. All these modes of expression constitute a language of feeling, a non-discursive form of thought, absolutely essential to our individual development and to the unity of social life. View quote
Herbert Read
For the first time the personality is deliberately cultivated as such; and from that time [the European Renaissance] until today it has not been possible to separate the achievements of a civilization from the achievements of the individuals composing it. I have not the slightest doubt that this form of individuation represents a higher stage in the evolution of mankind. The future unit is the individual, a world in himself, self-contained and self-creative, freely giving and freely receiving, but essentially a free spirit. View quote
Herbert Read
Art is most simply and most usually defined as an attempt to create pleasing forms. Such forms satisfy our sense of beauty and the sense of beauty is satisfied when we are able to appreciate a unity or harmony of formal relations among our sense-perceptions. View quote
Herbert Read
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. View quote
Herbert Read
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. View quote
Herbert Read
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. View quote
Herbert Read
All art originates in an act of intuition or vision. View quote
Herbert Read
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! View quote
Herbert Read
I believe that the poet is necessarily an anarchist, and that he must oppose all organized conceptions of the State, not only those which we inherit from the past, but equally those which are imposed on people in the name of the future. (Herbert Read)
A short poem is often called a lyric, which originally meant a poem short enough to be set to music and sung for a moment's pleasure. View quote
Herbert Read
The rhythm of a poem ceases the moment the feeling loses its intensity. View quote
Herbert Read
Such is our ideal – not another museum, another bleak exhibition gallery, another classical building in which insulated and classified specimens of a culture are displayed for instruction, but an adult play-centre, a workshop where work is a joy, a source of vitality and daring experiment. We may be mocked for our naive idealism, but at least it will not be possible to say that an expiring civilisation perished without a creative protest. View quote
Herbert Read
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 against the moral causes of war. Those moral causes lie within ourselves - and pacifists should not suppose for a moment that they are pure in heart in this respect. View quote
Herbert Read