We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
and Shakespeare and all the rest have been merely composing scenarios for unproduced films, and that the invention of the film camera must eventually abolish literature altogether. This seems to me to be an unsatisfactory position.
Another point on which I would welcome a little further enlightenment is his definition of technique. Beethoven began composing at the age of eleven, and his technique, according to all the best authorities, was continually progressing up to within a few years of his death. But Mr. Read says that most techniques can be learnt in a few days, or at most in a year or two. We can hardly assume that Beethoven was unusually slow-witted, so that Mr. Read must be using the word "technique" in a different sense. Indeed, this must be so, for he speaks as if there was only one technique for each art. Yet one says, for example, that Manet's technique differs from Picasso's, as if each artist had a technique of his own. I should be greatly obliged to Mr. Read if he would assist me here. But in any case, Mr. Read's statement that "no amount of technical efficiency will create a work of art if the imaginative genius is lacking," proves nothing; for it is equally true that no amount of imaginative genius will create a work of art if the technical efficiency is lacking.
With the exception of these few points I am in complete agreement with Mr. Read's article.
HERBERT READ REPLIES
I am very grateful to Mr. Dalton for giving me an opportunity of making myself clearer on one or two points in my rather impromptu article on "The Poet and the Film" — it was originally delivered as a speech. I do, of course, use "poet" in the wider sense, and not merely as a maker of verse. This may reduce my observation to a truism, but I think there is a distinction to be made between poetic imagination or fancy and what I would call prosaic ingenuity or invention, and my only purpose in using the rather doubtful word "creative" was to imply this distinction. Once that distinction is admitted, I think there is some sense in saying that "the film of imagination . . . will not come until the poet enters the studio."
As for the next point, I confess that the word "single" is unfortunate. What I should have written was "primary" or "elementary." The elementary aim of writing is to convey images, and this elementary aim remains a very essential one — even in verse, where so many other complications enter into the question, including not only verbal music but even legitimate effects of confused imagery, as in Milton's metaphor. Just as poetry has elaborated this
35