Raine, Kathleen Jessie

▪ 2004

      British poet, critic, and scholar (b. June 14, 1908, Ilford, Essex [now part of London], Eng.—d. July 6, 2003, London), was possessed of a visionary quality that separated her from her contemporaries. Late in life (at the age of 82), she founded Temenos Academy, supported by Prince Charles, which rejected the “secular materialism” of the current age. Raine won a scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge, where she read natural sciences and psychology. Shortly after graduating she married, eloped with another man, divorced her first husband, married again, bore two children, and divorced again, not given (she later said) to domesticity. She published her first volume of poems, Stone and Flower, in 1943 and followed in 1945 with Living in Time and in 1949 with The Pythoness. After World War II she made a living by translating and teaching. Her passionate but platonic seven-year relationship with the gay writer Gavin Maxwell brought her both joy and great pain. While teaching she published several works of literary criticism, including many on William Blake; several more collections of poetry, notably The Lost Country (1972) and Collected Poems (2000); and four volumes of autobiography—Farewell Happy Fields (1973), The Land Unknown (1975), The Lion's Mouth (1977), and India Seen Afar (1989). She was appointed CBE in 2000.

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