"I couldn't claim that I have never felt the urge to explore evil, but when you descend into hell you have to be very careful." -- Kathleen Raine
Kathleen Jessie Raine (14 June 1908 — 6 July 2003) was a British poet, critic, and independent scholar writing in particular on William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Thomas Taylor.
Known for her interest in various forms of spirituality, most prominently Platonism and Neoplatonism, she was a founder member of the Temenos Academy.
Raine was born in Ilford, Essex, the daughter of a mother (from Scotland) who was a major influence on her daughter, and a father (born in Wingate, County Durham) who had met as students at Armstrong College in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Raine spent part of World War I, 'a few short years', with her Aunty Peggy Black at the Manse in Great Bavington Northumberland: 'I loved everything about it.' For her it was an idyllic world and is the declared foundation of all her poetry. Kathleen always remembered Northumberland as Eden. 'In Northumberland I knew myself in my own place; and I never 'adjusted' myself to any other or forgot what I had so briefly but clearly seen and understood and experienced.' This period is described in the first book of her autobiography, Farewell Happy Fields (1973).
She was educated at County High School, Ilford, and then read natural sciences and psychology on an Exhibition at Girton College, Cambridge, receiving her master's degree in 1929. While in Cambridge she met Jacob Bronowski, William Empson, Humphrey Jennings and Malcolm Lowry.[1] In later life she was a friend and colleague of the kabbalist author and teacher, Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi.
From 1939 to 1941, Kathleen and her children shared a house at 49a Wordsworth Street in Penrith with Janet Adam Smith and Michael Roberts and later lived in Martindale. She was a friend of Winifred Nicholson.
Her complex and unsatisfactory private life included marriage to Hugh Sykes Davies, whom she left for Charles Madge — their subsequent marriage with two children broke up — and an unrequited passion for Gavin Maxwell. The title of Maxwell's most famous book Ring of Bright Water (subsequently made into a film of the same name starring Virginia McKenna) was taken from a line in Kathleen's poem The Marriage of Psyche. The relationship with Maxwell ended in 1956 when Raine lost his pet otter, Mijbil, indirectly causing the animal's death. Raine held herself responsible, not only for losing Mijbil but for a curse she had uttered shortly beforehand, frustrated by Maxwell's homosexuality: "Let Gavin suffer in this place as I am suffering now." Raine blamed herself thereafter for all Maxwell's misfortunes, beginning with Mijbil's death and ending with the cancer that took his life in 1969.
Raine's two children were Anna Madge (born 1934) and James Wolf Madge (1936). In 1959, James married Jennifer Alliston, one of the daughters of her friend, architect and town planner Jane Drew. Jane was a direct descendant of the neoplatonist Thomas Taylor whom Kathleen studied and wrote about. Thus a link was made between them - by her two grandchildren Sonia and Thomas Madge.
At the time of her death, following an accident, she resided in London.
Her first book of poetry, Stone And Flower (1943), was published by Tambimuttu, and illustrated by Barbara Hepworth. In 1946 the collection, Living in Time, was released, followed by The Pythoness in 1949. Her Collected Poems (2000) drew from eleven previous volumes of poetry. Her classics include Who Are We? There were many subsequent prose and poetry works, including Blake and Tradition, published in 1968.
The story of her life is told in a three-volume autobiography that is notable for the author's attempts to read (or impose) a structure on her memories that is quasi mythical, thus relating her own life to a larger pattern. This reflects patterns that can be detected in her poetry, in which she was clearly influenced by W. B. Yeats. The three books were originally published separately and later brought together in a single volume, entitled Autobiographies (the title itself is in conscious imitation of Yeats), edited by Lucien Jenkins.
Raine made excellent translations of Honoré de Balzac's Cousine Bette (Cousin Bette, 1948) and Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions, 1951).
She was a frequent contributor to the quarterly journal, Studies in Comparative Religion, which dealt with religious symbolism and the Traditionalist perspective. She founded, in 1981, Temenos, a periodical, and later, in 1990, the Temenos Academy of Integral Studies, a teaching academy that stressed a multistranded universalist philosophy, and in support of her generally Platonist and Neoplatonist views on poetry and culture. She studied the 18th-century English Platonist Thomas Taylor (1758—1835), and published a selection of his works.
Raine was a research fellow at Girton College from 1955 to 1961, and in 1962 she was the Andrew Mellon Lecturer at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. She taught at Harvard for at least one course about Myth and Literature offered to teachers and professors in the summer. She also spoke on Yeats and Blake and other topics at the Yeats School in Sligo, Ireland in the summer of 1974. A professor at Cambridge and the author of a number of scholarly books, she was an expert on Coleridge, Blake, and Yeats.
She received honorary doctorates from universities in the United Kingdom, France and the United States and won numerous awards and honors, including the Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize from the American Poetry Society (date unknown), and also:
1952 -- Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize
1953 -- Arts Council Award
1961 -- Oscar Blumenthal Prize
1970 -- Cholmondeley Award
1972 -- Smith Literary Award
1992 -- Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry
2000 -- Order of the British Empire, Commander
2000 -- L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Commandeur.
The Hollow Hill: and other poems 1960-1964, H Hamilton, 1965
Six Dreams: and other poems, Enitharmon, 1968
Penguin Modern Poets 17, Penguin, 1970
Lost Country, H. Hamilton, 1971
On a Deserted Shore, H. Hamilton, 1973
The Oracle in the Heart, and other poems, 1975—1978, Dolmen Press/G. Allen & Unwin, 1980
Collected poems, 1935—1980, Allen & Unwin, 1981
The Presence: Poems, 1984—87, Golgonooza Press, 1987
Selected Poems, Golgonooza Press 1988
Living with Mystery: Poems 1987-91, Golgonooza Press, 1992
The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine, ed. Brian Keeble, Golgonooza Press, 2000
Prose
Blake and Tradition, 2 volumes, Routledge, 1968
Thomas Taylor the Platonist. Selected Writings, Raine, K. and Harper, G.M., eds., Bollingen Series 88, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969 (also pub. Princeton University, USA).
William Blake, The World of Art Library - Artists, Arts Book Society, Thames and Hudson, London, 1970 (216 pp, 156 illustrations),
Yeats, the Tarot and the Golden Dawn, Dolmen Press, 1973
The Inner Journey of the Poet, Golgonooza Press, 1976
From Blake to a Vision, (p.u.), 1979
Blake and The New Age, George Allen and Unwin, 1979
"Yeats the Initiate", George Allen & Unwin, 1986
Blake and Tradition, 2 Volumes, Routledge, 2002
Seeing God Everywhere: Essays on Nature and the Sacred (World Wisdom, 2004) (contributed essay)
The Betrayal of Tradition: Essays on the Spiritual Crisis of Modernity (World Wisdom, 2005) (contributed essay)
