Kathleen Raine: The Use of the Beautiful

In these challenging times, perhaps the most challenging nationally and globally since the last world war, it is important we turn to the great values of our cultures, and look for unity in all things. For millenia, Beauty has been central to philosophy and artistic creation, and in this essay, from her remarkable collection Defending Ancient Springs, the poetess Kathleen Raine affirms these eternal principles. 

This blog is a space for open enquiry and debate, so when you read the essay, add your comments in the comments section of the site, your thoughts, questions, anything that comes to mind. Do not hesitate. Say something, because these thoughts cannot leave us indifferent!

Click on the link below to download the essay in pdf format. 

Click on the link below to read Kathleen Raine's essay on "Global Unity and the Arts"

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14FraNNSwbrfLG2NoQY_gfXp-kysRzWLv/view?usp=sharing

Interesting thoughts in our times of global connection and mass information, when we need meaning and values above mere accumulation of facts, and quality above mere quantity, recalling T. S. Eliot's words:

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

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:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Collected-Poems-Kathleen-Raine/dp/0571352022/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=kathleen+raine+faber&qid=1566731743&s=gateway&sr=8-1

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.