Kathleen raine short biography

In these matters to know once is to know forever. My mother when she was over eighty confided to me an experience she had had as a girl. That was all. But I understood that she had seen what I had seen.

Kathleen raine short biography

Buy Book. Join Our Newsletter. Temenos Academy. Spanish Portrait with an afterword by Vicky Randall. The Clapton PressLondon. The Guardian. The Scotsman. Retrieved 8 July Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts". Retrieved 26 August Bluestocking Oxford. Princeton University, USA. Temenos Academy,p. Proceedings of the British Academy. Temenos Conference, Oxford, 13—15 September Listing: Cardiff Violins Ltd.

Spell For. Archived from the original on 21 December — via www. Further reading [ edit ]. External links [ edit ]. Wikiquote has quotations related to Kathleen Raine. Lists of poets. Poetry portal. Authority control databases. Home Explore Poets Kathleen Raine. Biography Kathleen Raine was the author of twelve books of poetry, four of autobiography, and much scholarly work, particularly on Blake and Yeats, which prove her transcendent understanding of the art of poetry, and the art of living.

Poems by Kathleen Raine Ah, many, many, are the dead. Read the poem text. Who Are We? Daisies of Florence. Into What Pattern. Raine later wrote that she, like the Marxists to whom Madge introduced her, kathleen raine short biography that "the current of history which flows in one direction only, flowed the way that they were going.

The function of the arts is surely to awaken in people self-knowledge, knowledge of the scope and scale of their own humanity which they may not have been aware of. Madge, an aspiring poet like his wife, went on to become a prominent sociologist. He was a pioneer in the study of public opinion and helped found Mass-Observation, an organization intended to keep a running picture of the views of the British population for the purposes of market research.

Raine's marriage to Madge collapsed when she fell in love with still another individual from her circle at Cambridge, whom she has referred to only as "Alistair. Before her marriage to Madge ended, the couple had two children. In her autobiography, Raine made only elliptical references to the details of her two marriages. She was, however, far more kindly disposed toward Madge than toward Davies, stating that having "hurt a man so fine by marrying him for inadequate, indeed for deeply neurotic, reasons, lies heavily on my conscience.

Upon the outbreak of the war, at the invitation of friends from her second marriage, Raine and her two children settled near Penrith in Northumberland. Thus, Raine returned to a world of northern England she had cherished since childhood. She later recalled her sense of reconnection to her roots as she had become liberated "from Cambridge, from marriage, from Mass-Observation and Marxism, from Ilford.

In an action about which she wrote remorseful passages in her autobiography, she left her two children with a friend in Northumberland and returned to London, convinced of her need to pursue life as a poet. In the British capital, she found work in a wartime government agency, and published her first book of poetry, Stone and Flowerin It was illustrated by her friend Barbara Hepworth.

After a period of tormented indecision, Raine converted briefly to Roman Catholicismprobably in In the postwar years, Raine remained in London eking out a living by reviewing books, teaching part-time, and doing translations. She soon published a second volume of poems, Living in Time. Much of Raine's poetry drew upon her scientific background and featured a precise description of the physical world.

Nonetheless, her poetic style reflected her interest in classical philosophy and drew heavily upon the traditions of English Romanticism. Some critics see her emphasis on lyricism as a link to earlier English writers, including William Blake and Edmund Spenserand Raine has shown kathleen raine short biography interest in most of the work produced by contemporary poets.

Throughout much of her writing, Raine expressed her discomfort with "the bankrupt situation of materialist society. Concentrating on the works of William Blake, she published an initial study of his writing in and returned to Cambridge as a research fellow at Girton College to pursue this interest between and She was invited to give the Mellon Lectures in on Blake, and her study of his work, Blake and Traditionwhich appeared inis her most important volume of criticism and an extensive examination of his symbolic language and its roots in Platonic philosophy.

Students of her work have remarked upon her obvious affection for Blake's ideas on the need for humans to preserve their powers of connecting with their deepest emotions. She also found that Blake's writing employed "a traditional language … and was not to be understood in terms of a personal system, as many had previously thought, invented by himself.

Raine has often expressed her deep concern about the breakdown of traditional culture. She sees this as a tragedy that could end the ability to employ common literary allusions. Thus, if such "connotations, resonances are lost to a society as a whole, then poetry of real quality becomes impossible. A central force in Raine's life was her unhappy relationship with the travel writer and naturalist Gavin Maxwell.

Maxwell would later become famous as the author of A Ring of Bright Wateran account of the landscape and wild life of the sea coast. Raine first met him in the early s, when her publisher and friend arranged for this impoverished artist and poet to paint her portrait. Born into a wealthy family, Maxwell had recently lost his inheritance in a shark fishery scheme.

She soon discovered that he too had roots in Northumberland and Scotland. His homosexuality precluded a romantic relationship, but she encouraged him to abandon painting and to return to his career as a writer. He in turn offered her the use of his home near the western coast of Scotland. Raine dedicated her Collected Poemspublished into Maxwell.

But her emotional demands on him, perhaps compounded by the differences in their social backgrounds, led to a widening rift. She suffered a severe psychological blow in when she learned that Maxwell had decided to marry Lavinia Jeana woman from his own elevated social circle whom he had known for years.