Herbert Read: Expression

Herbert Read was English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art. Explore interesting quotes on expression.
Herbert Read: 84   quotes 0   likes

“The difference between poetry and prose is not one of surface qualities, or form, or mode of expression, but of essence. The state of mind in which poetry originates must either seek poetic expression or it must not be expressed.”

Herbert Read

Form in Modern Poetry(1932)

“Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression. … by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking. … There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.”

Herbert Read

English Prose Style (1928)
Literary Quotes

Thinking , Time

“Sentir mon Cœur is a privilege only granted to the exceptional man — the one who has the ability to find words that exactly (or, to himself, convincingly) express his feelings. … The value of words help to define the feeling itself. … The common failure is to allow habitual words and phrases, flowing spontaneously from the memory, to determine and deform the feelings.”

Herbert Read

Source: The Cult of Sincerity (1969), p. 16

Feeling , Failure , Memory , Help

“From the poet's viewpoint a lyric is a poem which embodies a single or simple emotional attitude that expresses directly an uninterrupted mood or inspiration.”

Herbert Read

Form in Modern Poetry(1932)

Mood

“The process of poetry consists firstly in maintaining this vision in its integrity and secondly in expressing this vision in words.”

Herbert Read

Form in Modern Poetry(1932)

“The revolutionary artist is born into a world of clichés, of stale images and signs which no longer pierce the consciousness to express reality. He therefore invents new symbols, perhaps a whole new symbolic system.”

Herbert Read

The Philosophy of Modern Art: Collected Essays (1971).
Other Quotes

World , Reality

“The modern world has largely forgotten, and our educational systems ignore, the primary importance, in the evolution of man, of various types of symbolic communication—the communication embodied in gesture, ritual, dance, music myth, and poetic metaphor. All these modes of expression constitute a language of feeling, a non-discursive form of thought, absolutely essential to our individual development and to the unity of social life.”

Herbert Read

Selected Writings—Poetry and Criticism. (1964).
Other Quotes

Communication , Music , Dance , World