I lived from 1893-1968.
I was from England, and am in the English category.
His college studies, at Leeds University, were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, in which he served with the Yorkshire Regiment in France and Belgium. During his service he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and Military Cross in the same year, 1918.
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Read wrote two volumes of poetry based upon his war experiences: Songs of Chaos (1915) and Naked Warriors, published in 1919, along with two volumes of autobiography: In Retreat (1925) and Ambush (1930). He became an outspoken pacifist during the Second World War.
Read survived the war and became a pacifist in the 1930s.
He continued to publish poetry for the remainder of his life, his final volume, Collected Poems, being published in 1966.
Following the war he completed his university studies, and then worked in the Treasury as an assistant principal, and became assistant keeper in the ceramics and stained glass department at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1922-31.
His works on art include The Meaning of Art (1931), Art Now (1933), The Innocent Eye (1933), Art and Industry (1934), Art and Society (1936) and Education Through Art (1943). As a literary critic he championed the 19th-century English Romantic authors, for example in The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry (1953).
Upon his return to London in 1933 he became editor of The Burlington Magazine, Britain’s foremost scholarly art journal, until 1939.
Knighted in 1953 by Churchill for services to literature, Sir Herbert Read, who married twice, died on 12 June 1968.
Bio - First World War Prose and Poetry
My poetry
His wild heart beats with painful sobs,
His strin'd hands clench an ice-cold rifle,
12 lines
You became
In many acts and quiet observances
82 lines, 2 comments
A soldier passed me in the freshly fallen snow,
His footsteps muffled, his face unearthly grey:
35 lines
Dolls' faces are rosier but these were children
their eyes not glass but gleaming gristle
18 lines
The golden lemon is not made
but grows on a green tree:
12 lines
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