Life & Wisdom Quote by Herbert Read

A poet’s line that reads like a manifesto is usually a trap door, and Herbert Read knows it. “Creeds and castes” lands with the clang of old machinery: rigid belief systems and inherited hierarchies, paired not because they’re identical, but because they rhyme in practice. Both sort people, freeze them into roles, and ask for loyalty before understanding. Read then widens the net to “all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping,” a phrase that sounds almost self-canceling, since poets, movements, and nations are built out of group feeling. The provocation is the point: he’s not denying humans their tribes so much as indicting the way tribes become substitutes for thinking and feeling.

The subtext is post-war exhaustion. Read lived through the First World War, watched ideology harden into mass politics, and saw the twentieth century’s talent for turning identity into administration. In that light, “belong to the past” isn’t a calm prediction; it’s a moral demand dressed up as inevitability. By framing these structures as already obsolete, he tries to shame them out of the present, the way a modernist calls a habit “Victorian” to make it collapse under its own embarrassment.

There’s also an artist’s hope buried inside the severity: the belief that aesthetic sensibility and individual conscience can outgrow the need for doctrinal shelter. Yet the line’s brilliance is its tension. Even as it longs for a future beyond categories, it exposes how seductive categories are, especially when “emotional grouping” feels like community rather than control. Read is betting that we can keep belonging without becoming owned.