The Herbert Read Conference 2004

Speaker: Michael Whitworth, University of Bangor
Title: Herbert Read and the New Metaphysical Poetry

In ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), T. S. Eliot urged that the modern poet must ‘become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.’ One aspect of such comprehensiveness was to look, as John Donne had, to the language of contemporary science and philosophy. In ‘The Nature of Metaphysical Poetry’ (1923), Herbert Read argued that the language of the modern physicists contained a ‘whole system of thought and imagery’ awaiting ‘fertilisation’ in the mind of the contemporary poet. The article may be read as a gloss on his poems in Mutations of the Phoenix (1923), which signalled their use of contemporary science with long epigraphs from A. N. Whitehead’s Principles of Natural Knowledge and A. S. Eddington’s Space, Time and Gravitation (1920).

The proposed paper will both interpret and contextualize the ‘metaphysical’ poetry of Mutations. It will include close readings of several of the poems, including ‘Equation’ and the title poem. It will ask what Read took from Whitehead and Eddington that he could not have taken from earlier intellectual sources, most obviously Bergson. His published comments on Whitehead and Eddington (mainly found in The New Age in 1921) will be taken into consideration. To contextualize the volume more broadly, the paper will ask why poets found it attractive and necessary to turn to philosophers and scientists at this time; in doing so, it will compare Read’s mode of metaphysical poetry with those of later poets, most probably William Empson and Michael Roberts.

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