Herbert Read Sir Herbert Edward Read , DSO , MC ( 1893 – 1968 ) was an English anarchist , poet , and critic of literature and art . He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism , and was strongly influenced by proto - existentialist thinker Max Stirner . Early life . The son of a farmer , Read was born at Muscoates near Nunnington , about four miles south of Kirkbymoorside in the North Riding of Yorkshire . His studies at the University of Leeds were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War , during which he served with the Green Howards in France . He received the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order , and reached the rank of captain . During the war , Read founded the journal " Arts and Letters " with Frank Rutter , one of the first literary periodicals to publish work by T . S . Eliot . Early work . Read ' s first volume of poetry was " Songs of Chaos " , self - published in 1915 . His second collection , published in 1919 , was called " Naked Warriors " , and drew on his experiences fighting in the trenches of the First World War . His work , which shows the influence of Imagism and of the Metaphysical poets , was mainly in free verse . His " Collected Poems " , appeared in 1946 . As a critic of literature , Read mainly concerned himself with the English Romantic poets ( e . g . , " The True Voice of Feeling : Studies in English Romantic Poetry , " 1953 ) but was also a close observer of imagism . He published a novel , " The Green Child " . He contributed to the " Criterion " ( 1922 – 1939 ) and he was for many years a regular art critic for the " Listener " . While W . B . Yeats chose many poets of the Great War generation for " The Oxford Book of Modern Verse " ( 1936 ) , Read arguably stood out among his peers by virtue of the 17 - page excerpt ( nearly half of the entire work ) of his " The End of a War " ( Faber & Faber , 1933 ) . Read was also interested in the art of writing . He cared deeply about style and structure and summarized his views in " English Prose Style " ( 1928 ) , a primer on , and a philosophy of , good writing . The book is considered one of the best on the foundations of the English language , and how those foundations can be and have been used to write English with elegance and distinction . Art criticism . Read was ( and remains ) better known as an art critic . He was a champion of modern British artists such as Paul Nash , Ben Nicholson , Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth . He became associated with Nash ' s contemporary arts group Unit One . Read was professor of fine arts at the University of Edinburgh ( 1931 – 33 ) and editor of the trend - setting " Burlington Magazine " ( 1933 – 38 ) . He was one of the organisers of the London International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 and editor of the book " Surrealism " , published in 1936 , which included contributions from André Breton , Hugh Sykes Davies , Paul Éluard , and Georges Hugnet . He also served as a trustee of the Tate Gallery and as a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum ( 1922 – 1939 ) , as well as co - founding the Institute of Contemporary Arts with Roland Penrose in 1947 . He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism , and was strongly influenced by proto - existentialist thinker Max Stirner . From 1953 – 54 Read served as the Norton Professor at Harvard University . For the academic year 1964 – 1965 and again in 1965 , he was a Fellow on the faculty at the Center for Advanced Studies of Wesleyan University . Anarchism and philosophical outlook . Politically , Read considered himself an anarchist , albeit in the English quietist tradition of Edward Carpenter and William Morris . Nevertheless , in 1953 he accepted a knight hood for " services to literature " ; this caused Read to be ostracized by most of the anarchist movement . Read was actively opposed to the Franco regime in Spain , and often campaigned on behalf of political prisoners in Spain . Dividing Read ' s writings on politics from those on art and culture is difficult , because he saw art , culture and politics as a single congruent expression on human consciousness . His total work amounts to over 1 , 000 published titles . Read ' s book " To Hell With Culture " deals specifically with his disdain for the term " culture " and expands on his anarchist view of the artist as artisan , as well as presenting a major analysis of the work of Eric Gill . It was republished by Routledge in 2002 . In his philosophical outlook , Read was close to the European idealist traditions represented by Friedrich von Schelling , Johann Gottlieb Fichte , and Samuel Taylor Coleridge , believing that reality as it is experienced by the human mind was as much a product of the human mind as any external or objective actuality . In other words , the mind is not a camera recording the reality it perceives through the eyes ; it is also a projector throwing out its own reality . This meant that art was not , as many Marxists believed , simply a product of a bourgeois society , but a psychological process that had evolved simultaneously to the evolution of consciousness . Art was , therefore , a biological phenomenon , a view that frequently pitted Read against Marxist critics such as Anthony Blunt in the 1930s . Read , in this respect , was influenced by developments in German art psychology . His Idealist background also led Read towards an interest in psychoanalysis . Read became a pioneer in the English - speaking world in the use of psychoanalysis as a tool for art and literary criticism . Originally a Freudian , Read came to transfer his allegiance to the analytical psychology of Carl Jung , eventually becoming both publisher and editor - in - chief of Jung ' s collected works in English . Read was probably the first English writer to take an interest in the writings of the French Existentialists , as early as 1949 , particularly those of Jean - Paul Sartre . Although Read never described himself as an existentialist , he did acknowledge that his theories often found support among those who did . Read perhaps was the closest England came to an existentialist theorist of the European tradition . Views on education . Herbert Read developed a strong interest in the subject of education and particularly in art education . Read´s anarchism was influenced by William Godwin , Peter Kropotkin and Max Stirner . Read " became deeply interested in children ’ s drawings and paintings after having been invited to collect works for an exhibition of British art that would tour allied and neutral countries during the Second World War . As it was considered too risky to transport across the Atlantic works of established importance to the national heritage , it was proposed that children ’ s drawings and paintings should be sent instead . Read , in making his collection , was unexpectedly moved by the expressive power and emotional content of some of the younger artist ’ s works . The experience prompted his special attention to their cultural value , and his engagement of the theory of children ’ s creativity with seriousness matching his devotion to the avant - garde . This work both changed fundamentally his own life ’ s work throughout his remaining twenty - five years and provided art education with a rationale of unprecedented lucidity and persuasiveness . Key books and pamphlets resulted : " Education through Art " ( Read , 1943 ) ; " The Education of Free Men " ( Read , 1944 ) ; " Culture and Education in a World Order " ( Read , 1948 ) ; " The Grass Read " , ( 1955 ) ; and " Redemption of the Robot " ( 1970 ) " . Read " elaborated a socio - cultural dimension of creative education , offering the notion of greater international understanding and cohesiveness rooted in principles of developing the fully balanced personality through art education . Read argued in Education through Art that " every child , is said to be a potential neurotic capable of being saved from this prospect , if early , largely inborn , creative abilities were not repressed by conventional Education . Everyone is an artist of some kind whose special abilities , even if almost insignificant , must be encouraged as contributing to an infinite richness of collective life . Read ’ s newly expressed view of an essential ‘ continuity ’ of child and adult creativity in everyone represented a synthesis ’ the two opposed models of twentieth - century art education that had predominated until this point . . . Read did not offer a curriculum but a theoretical defence of the genuine and true . His claims for genuineness and truth were based on the overwhelming evidence of characteristics revealed in his study of child art . . . From 1946 until his death in 1968 he was president of the Society for Education in Art ( SEA ) , the renamed ATG , in which capacity he had a platform for addressing UNESCO . . . On the basis of such representation Read , with others , succeeded in establishing the International Society for Education through Art ( INSEA ) as an executive arm of UNESCO in 1954 . " " Death and legacy . Following his death in 1968 , Read was arguably neglected due to the increasing predominance in academia of theories of art , including Marxism , which discounted his ideas . Yet his work continued to have influence . It was through Read ' s writings on anarchism that Murray Bookchin was inspired in the mid - 1960s to explore the connections between anarchism and ecology . In 1971 , a collection of his writings on anarchism and politics was republished , " Anarchy and Order , " with an introduction by Howard Zinn . In the 1990s there was a revival of interest in him following a major exhibition in 1993 at Leeds City Art Gallery and the publication of a collection of his anarchist writings , " A One - Man Manifesto and other writings for Freedom Press " , edited by David Goodway . Since then more of his work has been republished and there was a " Herbert Read Conference " , at Tate Britain in June 2004 . The library at the Cyprus College of Art is named after him , as is the art gallery at the University for the Creative Arts at Canterbury . Until the 1990s the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London staged an annual Herbert Read Lecture , which included well known speakers such as Salman Rushdie . On 11 November 1985 , Read was among sixteen Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey ' s Poet ' s Corner . The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow Great War poet , Wilfred Owen . It reads : " My subject is War , and the pity of War . The Poetry is in the pity . " A 1937 reading by Read lasting seven minutes and titled " The Surrealist Object " can be heard on the audiobook CD " Surrealism Reviewed " , published in 2002 . He was the father of the well - known writer Piers Paul Read , the BBC documentary maker John Read , and the art historian Ben Read . Quotations and excerpts . From " To Hell with Culture " : From " Poetry and Anarchism " :