Kathleen Raine

This book offers the chance to (re)discover the remarkable work of Kathleen Raine, a twentieth-century British poet (1908–2003). Raine is the author of a major poetic oeuvre centred on her love of nature and her knowledge of Neoplatonism. She is also the author of an inspiring autobiography as well as a renowned scholar who wrote numerous essays on the English Romantics, William Blake, and Irish Nobel Prize winner W. B. Yeats. This collection contains twelve chapters written by scholars from the US and Europe, who focus on different aspects of Raine’s work: the importance of nature and the sacred, her philosophical commitment to a spiritual vision of man, her efforts to disseminate a form of perennial wisdom (the Sophia Perennis) through the Temenos Academy, and her concern with passing this wisdom on to young people. Raine’s powerful voice, which arose in a century that she deemed plunged in deadly materialism, will resonate today with new generations yearning for a meaningful world.