Kathleen Jessie Raine

Kathleen Jessie Raine 1908-2003, English poet and critic, b. Ilford (now in Redbridge, Greater London), grad. Cambridge, 1929. Raine's poems and essays assert that true poetry is an expression of the spirit, the unfolding of a reality often hidden by the material appearance of things. Raine wrote a three-part autobiography (1973-7), founded (1981) the magazine Temenos in order to articulate her views, and established (1990) the Temenos Academy of Integral Studies, a teaching academy that stressed a multistranded universalist philosophy. A professor at Cambridge and the author of a number of scholarly books, she was an expert on Coleridge, Blake, and Yeats.

Bibliography: See her Collected Poems (1981, repr. 2001),

Raine, Kathleen (Jessie) (1908–2003), poet and critic, educated at Girton College, Cambridge, was formerly married to Charles Madge. She published many collections of poetry, from her first, Stone and Flower (1943), to her Collected Poems (1981), and also three volumes of autobiography. Later volumes include The Oracle in the Heart (1980) and Living with Mystery: Poems 1987–91 (1992). Much of her poetry is inspired by the landscapes of Scotland, and has an intense and mystic vision of the vitality of the natural world which also informed her critical work on Blake and the Neoplatonic tradition.