Herbert Read was one of the most distinguished men of letters in his generation, and it is not easy to disengage the poet from the literary critic, the critic of social ideas, the tireless expositor of modern art, or the author of several works of autobiography and fiction. Indeed some of his friends, including Graham Greene, would probably rate his account of his childhood, The Innocent Eye (1933), and his novel, The Green Child (1935), as prose poems and Read's outstanding "creative" achievements. But Read himself always thought of his verse as the center of his life's work. His poems, written over a period of half a century, run to about 250 pages in the latest collected edition--not a large body of poetry by some standards, but one sufficiently various and accomplished to merit attention.

Read was born on a farm near Kirbymoorside, Yorkshire, in 1893, the son of Herbert and Eliza...