A True Voice

The True Voice Of Feeling by Herbert Read. Pantheon. $4.00.

The range of Herbert Read’s voice as a critic of poetry is, surely, a major distinction in an age distinguished by its criticism. Inquisitive, tensile, and bold, Mr. Read’s critical activities for some thirty years are themselves a tracing of the chief intellectual movements on the graph of modern belief. Announcing a classical attachment in Reason and Romanticism (1926) that, looking backward, seems to have been curiously at variance with his actual practice as a poet, Mr. Read went progressively (it would be wrong to say logically) on to the attachments of Marxism, Freudianism, Anarchism, Surrealism and, most recently, to a Romanticism deepened and vitalized by all the previous explorations, and sounding some new notes of its own. It is a Romanticism which encompasses, in the paradoxical way of Mr. Read’s eclectic habit, a refined Existentialist association as well as a renewed technical interest in the behavior of poetry which reminds us that his early Form in Modern Poetry is still, perhaps, a locus classicus for the crucial issues of contemporary poetry.