Responding to Berry's observation that the power of Read's early poetry lay in its unflinching clarity - 'crisp as medals, bright but cool' -he stated that this diction emerged from a war that also reconfigured the cultural scene: 'I think the trauma of war experience has more to do with it than anything else. Corresponding with Francis Berry in 1953, who was busily writing an essay on him for the British Council, Read reflected on how the experience of war set him apart from others of his generation. The First World War was an enduring frame of reference for Herbert Read. He saw the war as at once disabling and liberating, and his continual return to the conflict as a subject in his writing was a process of attempting to fix its ultimate meaning to his life. It argues that Read's perception of the war was deeply ambiguous, and shifted in response to the changing view of the conflict in British cultural history. Utilizing archival material and analysing Read's poetry, prose and polemical writing, the present article contests this reading. His war poetry and autobiographical prose reflected on the horrors of fighting, and his anarchist-pacifism was a product, they argue, of experiencing the war first hand. Herbert Read and the fluid memory of the First World War: poetry, prose and polemic*Īccording to many critics, Herbert Read's experience fighting in the trenches of the First World War was a formative one that shaped his intellectual life.
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