Kathleen Raine died 15 years ago today

The mystical poet and scholar Kathleen Jessie Raine died on July 6th 2003 at the age of 95.

Her poetry - and that of her master William Blake - resonates with me much less than the poetry of Rudyard Kipling and many others does, but I find some of her other writings of great interest and relevance.

She has been featured and quoted in some articles on here, and there are some incidental references in others.

To mark the occasion, I want to say a little more about Kathleen Raine and her life.

Three books of interest

After reading Kathleen Raine’s three-volume autobiography, I went through it again and made notes of everything that seemed particularly insightful and resonated very strongly with my own thoughts and experiences. Much of the material I copied is very inspiring; much of is the exact opposite. Some of it provides independent confirmation of my own conclusions.  

I ended up with many pages of material; it is very tempting to reproduce a lot of it on here, but although I put some of her thoughts into this article and a few others, the quotations are best read in their original context. The three books I got the material from are Farewell Happy Fields, The Land Unknown and The Lion’s Mouth.

Kathleen Raine’s view of her life

While reading her autobiography, I noticed immediately that Kathleen Raine attempts to analyse and make sense of her ideas and experiences. She tries to make an honest evaluation of her life.

She tries hard to understand the causes of the suffering she has experienced; she takes responsibility where appropriate; she demonstrates great courage, understanding and insight.

All this is admirable and much of what she says seems spot on, but I noticed that something was missing.

She did it all as a free-standing exercise; there is no evidence that she ever compared her life with the lives of people who had similar ideas, feelings and experiences.

She did look at her life objectively, but only as the poet versus the non poets and as an independent sequence of events and ideas. She probably never realised that she was acting out some scripted scenarios in common with other creative people.

I am thinking of people such as Ouida, Elizabeth Taylor and Charlotte Brontë. I have mentioned some of the connections in various articles.

She had many feelings in common with other creative people. 

She was not the only one to experience desolation, an emotional wilderness and the isolation of the spirit. She was not the only one to pine for something that is not available in this world.

Even Stella Gibbons’s sorcerer Esmé Scarron searched for something he would never have; it was his spiritual appetite that made him reach out for metaphysical satisfactions.

Miscellaneous topics

Kathleen Raine said that people read to fill gaps in their lives and that “when you are the thing itself you don’t have to read about it.”

This is not always true. I do understand that people may read to get something that is unlikely to be available to them in real life – she said that much literature is a substitute for direct access to (high) society - but there are other reasons for reading.

For example, I know London well but love to read about places I have visited.

People who are part of high society may read books about it to have a laugh or to try to identify people they know. The books of Ouida and Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel had many such readers.

Kathleen Raine’s father truly believed that if ‘the people’ ruled, universal brotherhood would prevail.  He thought that they were free from vices when they just lacked the means to satisfy them. He mistook the enforced poverty of the lower social classes for the freely chosen ‘holy poverty’ of the saints.

She thought that making living conditions materially easy does not improve the quality of the people themselves; in some respects it has the opposite effect. She was an elitist; she thought that the barbarians so outnumber the people of culture that they themselves set the standards.

I think that she got it right there.

She said:

“I have always worked hardest and best at self-imposed tasks…”

So have I.

Kathleen Raine saw housework as a symbol of enslavement and drudgery. She hated and resented having to do it.

I have often felt like that myself. Georgette Heyer said, “How I loathe domesticity.” Ayn Rand was much the same; she had better things to do.

So little did Kathleen Raine know of the world that when she entered university, she thought that a future of unbroken happiness and freedom and the realisation of every hope lay before her.

Stella Gibbons, Ayn Rand and Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel all had that same feeling of euphoria, the feeling that life would be nothing but sunshine from then on. I have had it too.

Daimons and dark angels

Kathleen Raine attributed her creative gifts to having a personal daimon, a guardian angel or guiding spirit.

Rudyard Kipling said that he had a daemon who assisted him in his writing.

Although obeying the commands of these entities may cause much suffering - as does disobeying them - the results in the form of creative works may make the game seem worth the candle.

She said:

“The daimon’s advice is never wrong…the daimon is always right...never betray the dedication, the bond with the daimon… for to the daimons our lives are not means to such ends as we might wish...all those who have a daimon have a certain listening look...”

Demons are a different kind of entity altogether, Kathleen Raine mentions dark angels.

This raises the question of correct identification. How do we know which one is speaking to us? How do we know which inner promptings are coming from something that wants to help us fulfil our destiny and which ones come from something that wants to subvert and destroy us?

If I ever find out, I will write an article about it.