READ, Herbert. Poetry and Anarchism. London, Faber, [1938].
8vo. Original cloth with typographical dust-wrapper (not price-clipped); pp. 126, a little marking and darkening to wrappers, otherwise very good; a few pencil annotations in a light hand.
Uncommon first edition of this unusual Herbert Read title. 'One of the anarchists involved in rethinking anarchism around the time of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War was the English poet, art critic and essayist, Herbert Read (1893-1968). In Poetry and Anarchism (1938), Read acknowledged that “to declare for a doctrine so remote as anarchism at this stage of history will be regarded by some critics as a sign of intellectual bankruptcy; by others as a sort of treason, a desertion of the democratic front at the most acute moment of its crisis; by still others as mere poetic nonsense.” Read sought to “balance anarchism with surrealism, reason with romanticism, the understanding with the imagination, function with freedom” ... He developed an ecological conception of anarchism emphasizing spontaneity and differentiation' (Robert Graham's Anarchism Weblog).
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