READ, Herbert. Naked Warriors. London: [Pelican Press for] Art & Letters. 1919. [with:] —. The End of a War. London: Faber and Faber. 1933. [and:] —. Collected Poems.

READ, Herbert. Naked Warriors. London: [Pelican Press for] Art & Letters. 1919. [with:] —. The End of a War. London: Faber and Faber. 1933. [and:] —. Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber. 1946.

Naked Warriors: 8vo. Original card wrappers, printed in red, woodcut illustration by Wyndham Lewis to upper cover; pp. 60; wrappers a little dusty, a few small nicks to extremities, small chip to foot of spine; a very good copy; presentation inscription to half-title ‘for F. S. Flint / Herbert Read’, dated 16 March 1920.

The End of a War: 8vo. Original cream printed boards, in the dust-jacket priced 2s. 6d. net to front flap, tail-and fore-edges untrimmed; pp. 31, [1]; corners and extremities rubbed, lower edge of spine bumped with small loss (old adhesive repair), offsetting to endpapers, wrapper variously rubbed, torn and nicked with small losses to corners and spine ends, larger loss at head of rear cover, a few small adhesive repairs; a good copy in like wrapper; inscribed by the author to the dedication page, with an autograph letter signed from Read to the book’s dedicatee, Captain Lancelot Simpson (see below).

Collected Poems: 8vo. Original pale blue cloth, spine lettered in silver to red lettering piece on spine, in the dust-jacket priced 8s. 6d. net to front flap, fore-edges untrimmed; pp. 201, [3 (blank)]; spine lightly sunned (particularly at head and foot), spine ends slightly bumped, losses to wrapper at head and foot of spine, affecting one or two letters at each end, small nicks and closed tears to edges; a very good copy in a good wrapper; presentation inscription to Huntington Cairns to front free endpaper, dated 1960.

Association copies – one the dedication copy – of Herbert Read’s two volumes of war poetry, the first written during the war itself and the second returning to it more than a decade later, together with a presentation copy of Read’s 1946 Collected Poems.

Herbert Read’s reputation as a poet has perhaps suffered from the breadth of his interests (as literary critic, educationalist, anarchist, philosopher, art critic and eloquent advocate for modern art and design).

He was, however, a poet first, and, like his friend and publisher T. S. Eliot, a distinguished ‘poet-critic’ – a role that may have inhibited his verse (he was fearsomely self-critical). These volumes – including his two principal works addressing the war in which he served, and which continued to haunt him – represent distinct phases in his poetic development and corresponding approaches to the subject.

Naked Warriors embodies the tensions at the heart of this early poetics. An angry book, its epigraph (‘War through my soul has driven / Its jagged blades: / The riven / Dream fades […]’) sets the tone. The poems, many written during the early stages of the war, still adhere to the tenets of Imagism (influenced by Read’s friends and mentors T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, and Pound), ‘the abstract clarity of the […] technique [offering Read] a coping strategy for the horrors of war’ (Adams). In the best of these, Read renders experience with unsentimental precision (‘Mute figures with bowed heads / They travel along the road: / Old Women, incredibly old / and a hand-cart of chattels’ – ‘The Refugees’), yet he soon came to feel that the unmediated presentation of image or idea was inadequate to the emotional pressures animating the poems. This copy of Naked Warriors is presented by Read to F. S. Flint (1885–1960), fellow Imagist and author of the 1913 essay in the Poetry Review which provided a theoretical basis for the movement, and of the influential volumes Cadences (1915) and Otherworld: Cadences (1920).

Thirteen years later, The End of a War marks Read’s closest approach to a reconciliation of poetry and war, aesthetics and experience. His treatment of the incident upon which the volume is based – and, indirectly, of his own wartime experience – is at once subtler and more oblique than in the earlier work. His poetics now drew upon his reading of Freud, centring on the role of ‘personality’ (for Read, something like a union of Freud’s ego and id), as against ‘character’, which he defined as ‘[a] disposition in the individual due to the repression of certain impulses which would otherwise be present in the personality.’ Although Read and his publisher and friend T. S. Eliot remained close, this poetics of ‘personality’ brought them into friendly conflict. Eliot had famously written that poetry was not an expression of personality but an escape from it – the obverse of Read’s position – and Read later recalled that when Eliot declared himself to be ‘a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics and an Anglo-Catholic in religion, I could only retort that I was a romantic in literature, an anarchist in politics and an agnostic in religion.’ (The Cult of Sincerity, 1968). In his 1933 Page Barbour lectures (published as After Strange Gods the same year as The End of a War), Eliot went as far as to cite Read’s statements on personality as one of his four examples of modern heresy.

The End of a War first appeared in Eliot’s Criterion at the end of 1932 and was published by Faber the following year. The title is both literal (the poem is set on the eve of the Armistice) and indicative of retrospective catharsis (cf. Robert Graves’s Good-Bye to All That, 1929). The three-part poem is based on a real incident, set out in the opening prose Argument: an advancing British regiment headed by ‘Lieut. S—’, preparing to enter a French town in pursuit of retreating German forces, encounters a wounded German officer who assures the Lieutenant that his compatriots have departed. The troops advance, only to be ambushed. As they withdraw, a group of survivors return and kill the German officer; others discover the mutilated body of a French girl in an abandoned house. ‘When the discovery was reported to Lieut. S—, he went to verify the strange crime, but there was nothing to be done; he was, moreover, sick and tired. He found a bed in another cottage near the château, […] fell into a deep sleep, and did not wake until the next morning, the 11th of November, 1918.’ The three sections are devoted respectively to the internal dialogue of the German officer, the body and soul of the French girl, and a British officer [based on Lieut. S—] waking to hear church bells announcing the Armistice. Many have speculated on the source of the episode: ‘There is no possibility of this being a disguised account of an episode in which Read took part, since on Armistice Day he was in England.’ (Woodcock); ‘Read must have heard the story from his fellow Green Howards, but about a unit other than his own, for although the Second Green Howards were involved in just this sort of fighting throughout October and November 1918 in the same part of France as described in the poem, their battalion diary does not tally in detail with his account.’ (Cecil).

This, the dedication copy, with Read’s laid-in letter, makes clear that the episode was based on the experiences of Captain Lancelot Simpson M.C., to whom the volume is dedicated. Signed and dated by Read (10 November 1933, the date of publication and anniversary of the incident recounted) beneath the printed dedication, the accompanying manuscript letter, on Read’s own headed notepaper (also dated 10. xi. 33.), informs Simpson that the poem appears ‘in book form [and] I have taken the liberty of dedicating it to you.’ Read refers to ‘the notes you once lent me & which you wanted back’, now lost in the confusion of moving, adding that ‘as I gradually straighten things it will turn up again & then I will send it on.’ Little is known of Simpson, but it is significant that The End of a War (both the poem and this copy) is dedicated to a fellow soldier.

In Poetry and Experience (1967), Read observed that the experience of war had been his lifelong preoccupation, but eventually concluded that war could not be written: ‘I have never written about the real horror of fighting, which is not death nor the fear of mutilation, discomfort or filth, but a psychopathic state of hallucination in which the world becomes unreal and you no longer know whether your experience is valid - in other-words whether you are any longer sane.’ Yeats similarly maintained that poetry written in the immediacy of war lacked ‘significant distance’ between mind and event, excluding what we now regard as the central poetry of the conflict from his influential Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936). He included, however, a substantial portion of Read’s The End of A War, recognising its ability to transmute experience from a sufficient distance (a Wordsworthian ‘recollection in tranquillity’).

The accompanying copy of Read’s first Collected Poems (1946) is inscribed to Huntington Cairns (1904–1985), writer and lawyer who worked at different times for the U.S. Treasury, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and Johns Hopkins University. Read’s inscription was made in May 1960 at Rock Creek Cemetery and includes the phrase ‘the inevitable acceptance of the intellectual’, which seems to be Read’s own.

See Cecil, ‘Herbert Read and the Great War’ in Goodway ed., Herbert Read Reassessed (1998); Woodcock, Herbert Read: The Stream and the Source (1972); Adams, ‘Herbert Read and the Fluid Memory of the First World War’, in Historical Research, 88.240 (2015).

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