Read, Sir Herbert Edward

(1893-1968)

   Born in Yorkshire, he studied at Leeds University from 1911 to 1914, then was commissioned into the Green Howards regiment and won both the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order. He was assistant keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1919-1922) and held several academic posts, including Watson Gordon professor of fine art in Edinburgh University, and Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry at Harvard University. In 1947 he co-founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts and was a respected international authority on art. He was knighted in 1953. He died at Stonegrave, not far from where he was born. He published over sixty books on art, history and, with M. Foreman, edited the Collected Works of C.J. Jung. He is memorialized by a stone in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey along with other poets of the First World War. Some of his poetry publications: Songs of Chaos, 1915. Poems, 1914-1934, 1935. Thirty-Five Poems, 1940. Collected Poems, 1966. Some of his poems: "1945," "A Short Poem for Armistice Day," "Aeroplanes," "Bombing Casualties: Spain," "The Analysis of Love," "The Falcon and the Dove," "Ypres."

   Sources: Collected Poems of Herbert Read. SinclairStevenson, 1994. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). Poems of Protest Old and New. Arnold Kenseth, ed. MacMillan, 1968. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Verse. John Heath-Stubbs and David Wright, eds. Faber and Faber, 1975. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Westminster Abbey Official Guide (no date).