Herbert Read Named to '54 Norton Chair

Sir Herbert Read, British poet and art critic, has been named next year's Charles Eliot Norton Professor. Read was chosen by a committee headed provisionally by John P. Coolidge, curator of the Fogg Museum. He will be in residence at Harvard and will deliver the customary six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures.

The Fine Arts department, under whose auspices Read will appear, is still uncertain about whether he will give a course in addition to the formal lectures. Frederick B. Deknatel, professor of Fine Arts and chairman of the committee to select the lecturer, has conferred with Read in England, but has not yet returned to the United States and no decision has been announced by his office.

Read is president of the Society for Education in Art, and has taught at the Universities of Edinburgh, London, and Liverpool. From 1933 to 1939 he was editor of the Burlington Magazine.

Known for his poetry and political philosophy as well as his art criticism, Read is the author of "The Meaning of Art," "Form in Modern Poetry," "The Politics of the Unpolitical," "Education Through Art," "Poetry and Anarchism," "Collected Essays," and many other interpretive works on art and poetry.

The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship was established in 1925 in memory of the former Harvard art historian. The field of the Lecturer alternates, each year covering one of the fine arts, including poetry, music, literature, and art.