Raine, Kathleen | Raine, Kathleen 1908–
Raine, Kathleen 1908–
Kathleen Raine is a British poet, an authority on Blake, a translator and critic, as well as a natural scientist. She was one of the Cambridge poets of the 1930s, with William Empson.
Kathleen Raine is a woman whose pity tends to lapse into self-pity. But she holds with Muir that "the ever-recurring forms of nature mirror an eternal reality." Central to the poetry of both is a sense of that "eternal reality" as the goal of the human pilgrimage and the source of pure joy. Kathleen Raine's poems gain in depth and subtlety because they keep returning to the actualities that embody the mystery of the physical universe and of conscious selfhood. Not alone the stars, the mountain pool, the rock, the fish, the bird, but the chromosome and the nucleus of the atom are integral to her vision of the world, which she regards as the Word made flesh. Close as she seems to Blake, she appears to have escaped his confusions, and she is not at...
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