Herbert Read As A Twentieth-Century Romantic Poet

Abstract

<p>Herbert Read's avowed aim to "rehabilitate" Romanticism resulted in a literary criticism which defended his own practice as a poet. While his poetry was Romantic in its concentration on the imagination and the power of Nature, it demonstrated a serious problem with the Romantic ideal of the expression of the self. His war poetry, as the poetry of a significant shaping experience, can be seen as demonstrating, with a particular clarity, that difficulty in all three phases: the poetry written during the War, the poetic summation of the Great War in The End of a War, and finally the poetry written in reaction to war from 1936 onward. Read's reluctance to confront the matter of confessional expression in poetry is clearly demonstrated in his poems that take as subject the world beyond war. A constant theme in this poetry, free of concern with war, is the conflict between reason and imagination; a conflict which resolves itself into the paradox of a Romantic denial of the self.</p>