In compiling her Collected Poems, Kathleen Raine drew from six decades of poetry to decide the canon by which she wished to be judged and remembered. The result was this definitive edition, now published by Faber & Faber, which on first release in 2001 was welcomed both by Raine's admirers and by those newly discovering a poet who has unfailingly given voice to a vision of life in which the temporal, in all its modes and places, is imbued with the numinous and the eternal.
In compiling her 'Collected Poems', Kathleen Raine was uniquely placed to look back on more than six decades of her poetry and to decide the canon by which she wished to be judged and remembered. From its first appearance her poetry has been recognised as possessing a rare imaginative integrity, remaining faithful to a formal purity of voice, as well as to an imagery whose resonances are at once her own voice yet speak as if from the heart of the human condition itself.
Exploring the life of Kathleen Raine, who played an important role in the literary history of 20th-century England, this authorized biography tells how she developed from a small girl who only wanted to be a poet into a world-renowned poet and literary scholar. Starting with Kathleen’s struggle against the constrictions of her suburban childhood, the story of her life then continues with her exciting days at Girton College in the 1920s, where she became friends with many brilliant writers, artists, and scientists. She published Blake and Tradition, marking her as a leading William Blake scholar, and works on Coleridge, Yeats, and Thomas Taylor subsequently followed. Late in life, she founded the journal Temenos with the help of Prince Charles and was honored with the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry. Using letters, documents, and personal interviews, the extensive research shows how a woman from a modest background used her talents and ambition, in spite of the problems that they may cause, to achieve worldwide distinction in her chosen field. This complete picture of a complex and brilliant individual sympathetically assesses Kathleen Raine's work while throwing a critical light on her private life, which was often at odds with her achievements.
Pulitzer Prize winner Sylvia Plath’s complete poetic works, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes. By the time of her death on 11, February 1963, Sylvia Plath had written a large bulk of poetry. To my knowledge, she never scrapped any of her poetic efforts. With one or two exceptions, she brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her, rejecting at most the odd verse, or a false head or a false tail. Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy. The end product for her was not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily exhausted her ingenuity. So this book contains not merely what verse she saved, but—after 1956—all she wrote. — Ted Hughes, from the Introduction
A comprehensive and scholarly review of contemporary British and Irish Poetry With contributions from noted scholars in the field, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a collection of writings from a diverse group of experts. They explore the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that comprise these two distinct but interrelated national poetries. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companion to Literature and Culture series, this book contains a comprehensive survey of the most important contemporary Irish and British poetry. The contributors provide new perspectives and positions on the topic. This important book: Explores the institutions, histories, and receptions of contemporary Irish and British poetry Contains contributions from leading scholars of British and Irish poetry Includes an analysis of the most prominent Irish and British poets Puts contemporary Irish and British poetry in context Written for students and academics of contemporary poetry, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a comprehensive review of contemporary poetry from a wide range of diverse contributors.
Kathleen Raine was one of the most eminent literary figures of the twentieth century-as poet, scholar, and editor. During her long and distinguished career she knew many of the leading writers and artists among her contemporaries. However, Autobiographies is an illuminating attempt to chart the inner course of her life. It opens with a magical evocation of childhood in a remote Northumbrian hamlet during the First World War. The close-knit community she knew, while growing up far from the modern world, was to remain an enduring image for her of Paradise, lost and ever after sought for. While studying science at Cambridge, as a contemporary of William Empson, Humphrey Jennings, Jacob Bronowski, and Malcolm Lowry, she moved uneasily in the prevailing atmosphere of positivist science and socialist excitement, before finding the path of her spiritual quest lay in a very different direction. In the final part of her story she describes her friendship with Elias Canetti, and her important and intense relationship with Gavin Maxwell. Kathleen Raine's reputation has never stood higher than at present, and this collected edition of her autobiographies, as well as being the perfect introduction to her workas a whole, takes its place as an illustrious successor to the autobiographies of W. B. Yeats and Edwin Muir.
"A book of great beauty and charm...[Raine] has a profound, sometimes agonized understanding of what it means to be alive, to be old, to be aware always of that deeper, truer life that lies somewhere out there behind and beyond our daily existence" --Basi
