Kathleen Raine

This book considers Raine’s engagement with Graeco-Roman philosophy in her poetry, scholarship, essays, and autobiographical writings. Kathleen Raine was a poet, literary scholar, and co-founder of the Temenos Academy, an educational charity dedicated to the study of world philosophies. Raine garnered acclaim during her lifetime: in 1962, she became the first woman to deliver the A. W. Mellon lectures and received the 1992 Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry. Her interpretation of the classical past informed her persona as poet and scholar, and in both tasks she sought to reintroduce to Western society what she viewed as the lost symbolic discourse of a ‘perennial philosophy’. Her way of seeing the world, traceable from antiquity to the present day, distinguished no separation between inner self and outer world and stressed the interconnectedness of all beings.

Jenny Messenger explores Raine’s readings of antiquity as characterised by a perpetual, though by no means seamless, flow of meaning between the classical and the modern. From this overarching perspective, the first chapter foregrounds Raine’s disillusionment with mainstream academia and her attempts to recentre a forgotten spiritual tradition rooted in Graeco-Roman philosophy; the second chapter considers her autobiographical accounts of self and subjectivity; and the third chapter explores Raine’s creation of a poetic aesthetic that manifests the tension between symbolic expression and the limits of human knowledge. Messenger concludes by taking account of Raine’s complex classicism and its parallels in her experience of nature as something both outside and within us.