Useful links:


University of Nottingham
Institute for Research
in Visual Culture


Tate Britain Conferences



The Herbert Read Library
at the University of Leeds



University of Victoria Library
Herbert Read Collection



The Herbert Read
Discussion Group



Basic Biography of Read



Herbert Read Books
Available

The Herbert Read Conference 2004

The Herbert Read Conference, Tate Britain, London, 25 and 26 June 2004
Jointly organised by the University of Nottingham Institute for Research in Visual Culture and Tate Britain


Speaker: Kieron Winn, independent scholar
Title: Read and T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot was the writer with whom Read was most closely linked, and this paper examines their intellectual and personal relationship. They met in 1917, and at first Eliot believed that Read shared his classical modernist agenda; later, when Read's latent romanticism erupted, Eliot came to see his work as almost heretical (though they remained close friends). This paper reveals their increasingly apparent differences of temperament and belief, differences which resolve along one axis: Eliot's need for dogma and objective truth, reflected in his stress on impersonality; and Read's aspiration to an emotionally spontaneous, undogmatic fluidity, a free disposition in life and art, expressed in his idea of personality.

Read and Eliot represent many fundamental dualities: personality and impersonality; doubt and dogma; subjectivity and objectivity; 'romanticism' and 'classicism'. Within the modern movement, they display two poles of human potential.














































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