Search Results

The opening chapter examines the aesthetic philosophy and critical influence of Herbert Read, holding in balance his activities as establishment figure, art historian, and poet. It argues for the centrality of his undervalued poetic sequence 'Vocal Avowals' (1959), to which he returned repeatedly throughout the final decade of his life, to suggest that this collection was the most radical attempt made by Read to disturb the expressive potential of language. Referring to correspondence with T. S. Eliot, Ben Nicholson, and other contemporaries, the discussion considers the occasion of the collection’s composition—his ‘abstract’ poetry—as one charged with a confluence of Read’s intellectual, creative, and philosophical motivations, as well as an attempt to bring together Continental and American influences drawn from art and literature both before and after World War Two.

This chapter focuses on the discourses that surrounded the 1936 International Surrealist exhibition in London and the development of a distinctly British Surrealist movement in the years leading up to the Second World War. Using the debates in the periodical press about the movement – and how it might represent a particularly English or British avant garde – this chapter articulates the connection between the movement’s leaders in Britain and the rise of institutional structures to encourage avant garde work in Britain. In particular, it sees Herbert Read as one of the key mediators of modernism in Britain, and ultimately the key driver for the institutionalisation of modernism in Britain in the years around the Second World War.

This chapter examines the importance of the memory of the First World War to Herbert Read’s political thought, contextualising this process of memory formation through his interactions with two of the war’s leading literary figures: Richard Aldington and Erich Maria Remarque. Emphasising the importance of the post-war context in cultivating Read’s political reading of his experiences, it shows how the war continued to shape his political thought. Read’s experiences led to an abhorrence of violence and in turn a commitment to pacifism and gradualist tactics. Moreover, his time in the trenches led him to recognise the importance of ‘fidelity’ between members of a group in ensuring survival in times of extreme danger. Shorn of its militarist associations, this idea, Read argued, could helpfully bolster anarchist conceptions of organisation.

William Kupinse looks to Herbert Read’s speculative novel, The Green Child, in order to suggest that seeing cold, stony modernist emotion as affective, and therefore material, requires a transformation of one’s understanding of the body. This body, which holds a kinship with objects, is the opposite of life. This transmutation is staged in Read’s novel, where emotions are felt as colors on the skin and the height of life is achieved via a contemplation that turns one’s body to solid crystal.

This chapter and the next argue for a reimagining of the high modernist period as one marked by antimodern satire. The chapter focuses on the satire of T.S. Eliot, including the networks and complementing figures who imitated, influenced, extended, and challenged Eliot’s vision and praxis. One essential configuration in such networks was what Louis Untermeyer once referred to as “satiric futurism,” the poetry from a cohort of verse writers – now hardly spoken of – who in the late 1910s and 1920s modelled themselves on Eliot’s quatrain poems and whose imitations reveal more starkly the nature of Eliot’s satiric aesthetic, which he continued to make use of in The Waste Land. This satirical praxis was accompanied by theoretical formulations carefully outlined in Eliot’s concomitant critical writings and taken up again and developed by Wyndham Lewis. It can also be found to be both counterpointed and advanced by Virginia Woolf’s 1922 novel Jacob’s Room, which critiques masculinist modernisms and at the same time evinces the broad appeal and range of modernist satire as a project of anti-humanist deconstruction.

This chapter studies how British culture served as a form of counter-history, revealing that George Orwell and Herbert Read visualised a naturalised cultural habitus as a safeguard against a threatening history. On the other hand, H.G. Wells envisioned a post-historical and rationally administered culture as a cure to the violent crisis of the historical present. The discussion then examines the works of Orwell, Read, Wells, Robert Graves and Ezra Pound in 1941. This is followed by a study of Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, her posthumously published novel.

This brief afterword focuses on a late proposal by Lewis for a book that was never published, expanding on the critical Listener article, ‘Bread and Ballyhoo’, in which he mounted his critique of the Arts Council of Great Britain. This proposition demonstrates some of the key critical concerns for Lewis in relation to visual art in the last years of his life; his fears about the direction of art education; the perpetuation of class inequality within the arts; and the perceived failure of the establishment to recognise and nurture new talent. Some of these concerns ultimately fed into his 1954 book, The Demon of Progress in the Arts, in which he articulated his support for a new school of painting – including figures like Francis Bacon, Michael Ayrton, and Robert Colquhoun – within a framework of anti-abstraction and a critique of the newly-formed ICA. This afterword explores and contextualises these late manifestations of Lewis’s critical energies, surveying his late recognition as a writer and artist in the 1950s, before his reputational decline into obscurity after his death, an obscurity which prevailed until recent decades.

This chapter discusses how the major advances in endocrinology, entomology and evolutionary biology during the interwar years of the early 1900s influenced the works of the English poets, Herbert Read, William Empson, W.H. Auden and John Rodker. It suggests that the most significant implication of biology on these modernist poets was a sense of the human as falling away into the animal and, at the same time, sparked a renewed interest in human emotion and behavior in an expanded chemical and environmental context.

World War I has long been considered literary modernism’s defining historical event, a catastrophe that changed avant-garde optimism into postwar pessimism and fragmentation; however, the utopian rhetoric of post-World War I architecture, along with writers’ enthusiastic elaboration of that rhetoric through architectural criticism, undermines any neat division. Instead, this chapter establishes a late 1920s and 1930s tendency to identify in hindsight a wartime rupture between the national future and the modernist future, as literary and architectural cooperation began to dissolve. Amid the rise of architectural modernism in Britain, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, and Wyndham Lewis scrutinized the cultural integration of modernist forms. While Waugh and Betjeman increasingly emphasized modernist architecture’s inability to provide a lasting social or physical structure for the nation, Lewis rued the perceived cooption of modernism by leftist, materialist movements and instead promoted the values of “extreme modernism.”