Kathleen Raine

Kathleen Raine (1908–2003) graduated from Cambridge University in 1929. She became one of English literature's most remarkable twentyth-century practitioners. Although she considered herself primarily a poet, she was also a prolific writer of prose, an astute critic, and a distinguished scholar. Her 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 (1973-1977), founded the magazine Temenos in 1981 to articulate her views, and in 1990 established 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.