Kathleen Raine: A Voice for the Twenty-First Century

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.

Claire Garnier-Tardieu is Professor Emerita at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her interest in Kathleen Raine dates back to the 1980s, when she met the great British poet and wrote a PhD on her work. She is the author of translations, articles and a biographical essay. She has recently organized an International Conference on Raine in Paris and given several lectures on the topic.

Jessica Stephens is a senior lecturer at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, where she teaches literary translation. Her publications include articles on Alice Oswald, Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Racine, etc. She has edited and co-edited several volumes of the translation studies journal Palimpsestes and co-edited a book on the notion of resistance in British poetry.