Herbert Read Quotes

72 Sourced Quotes

The work of art … is an instrument for tilling the human psyche, that it may continue to yield a harvest of vital beauty.

Herbert Read
Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.

Herbert Read
From the poet's viewpoint a lyric is a poem which embodies a single or simple emotional attitude that expresses directly an uninterrupted mood or inspiration.

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

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

Herbert Read
Sentir mon Cœur is a privilege only granted to the exceptional man — the one who has the ability to find words that exactly (or, to himself, convincingly) express his feelings. … The value of words help to define the feeling itself. … The common failure is to allow habitual words and phrases, flowing spontaneously from the memory, to determine and deform the feelings.

Herbert Read
The rhythm of a poem ceases the moment the feeling loses its intensity.
The feeling (of intensity) held in a crystal cage, asn an image, sealed and immortalized for our contemplation. Beauty in a wild foray, the form we have created, now, remote from the emotion we experience.

Herbert Read
I saw him stab
And stab again
A well-killed Boche.
This is the happy warrior,
This is he…

Herbert Read
Words, their sound and even their very appearance, are, of course, everything to he poet.

Herbert Read
Lorca was killed, singing,
and Fox who was my friend.
The rhythm returns: the song
which has no end.

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.

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!

Herbert Read