Sunday 25 August 2019



A brief introduction to one of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century

Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) 

The Collected Poems have just been published by Faber & Faber:



Kathleen Raine is one of the most distinguished writers of our time. Born in 1908, she lived through the upheavals of the twentieth century and knew some of its most illustrious men and woman of letters, including T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, St John Perse and Ted Hughes.

 
She spent some of the most formative years of her childhood in a remote Northumberland hamlet, and although a poet at heart, chose to read botany and zoology in the Cambridge of the 1920s “because nature was my theme”. Recognised as one of the leading scholars of William Blake and W. B. Yeats, she has left behind a body of critical work and literary essays of immense significance. Yet it is foremost as a poet that she lived, publishing several collections of visionary verse in which she expresses the numinous qualities of daily life that the modern world has largely forgotten.
Her faithfulness to this vision kept Kathleen Raine on the margins of the literary and university establishment, which had placed itself under what she always considered to be the domination of materialist ideology, and so cut off from the timeless traditions which have given us the greatest productions of Western art. Yet this same faithfulness, and determination, led her to co-found the journal Temenos in 1980, leading in turn to the Temenos Academy, launched in 1990, whose Patron is the Prince of Wales. The Academy is now a teaching organisation based in London, devoted to the learning of the Imagination, both of East and West and the understanding of tradition as continual renewal. The many publications include the Temenos Academy Review. The year's programme of lectures can be found here (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OpejU1veAX9dmXkcMgTSfjuzfETZF0bB/view?usp=sharing) and on the Temenos Academy site (https://www.temenosacademy.org/). The site also contains an extensive audio archive of lectures, as well as information about the newly created two-year diploma course on the Perennial Philosophy.

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1 comment:

  1. Cécile Cerf31 August 2019 at 22:18

    Certains recueils de poésie de Kathleen Raine ont été magnifiquement traduits en français. Chez Verdier, on peut ainsi lire, en édition bilingue, La Présence. Voici un poème en anglais, suivi de sa traduction par Philippe Giraudon:

    Tell me, dark world,
    What it is you know
    That I dare not.

    Destruction is the mode,
    Love an old story
    That none believes.

    I ask the grass:
    To every living cell
    God's secret told,

    Knowledge of the all,
    In each seed
    The axis mundi

    Where blood is shed
    Of one who dies
    And rises from the dead.


    Révèle-moi, monde obscur,
    Ce que tu sais
    Que je n'ose pas.

    La destruction est la norme,
    L'amour une vieille histoire
    En laquelle nul ne croit.

    J'interroge l'herbe:
    A chaque cellule vivante
    Le secret de Dieu est révélé,

    Connaissance du tout,
    A chaque graine
    L'axis mundi

    Où se répand le sang
    D'un homme qui meurt
    Et ressuscite d'entre les morts.




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