First published in 1979, this is a very welcome reissue of Kathleen Raine's seminal study of William Blake - England’s only prophet. He challenged with extraordinary vigour the premises which now underline much of Western civilization, hitting hard at the ideas of a naive materialist philosophy which, even in his own day, was already eating at the roots of English national life. In his insistence that ‘mental things are alone real’, Blake was ahead of his time. Materialist views are now challenged from various quarters; the depth psychologies of Freud and Jung, the study of Far Easter religion and philosophy, the reappraisal of myth and folk lore, the wealth of psychical research have all prepared the way for an understanding of Blake’s thought. We are ready to acknowledge that in attacking ‘the sickness of Albion’ Blake penetrated to the inner worlds of man and explored them in a way that is quite unique. Dr Raine, who has made a long study of Blake’s sources, presents him as a lonely powerful genius who stands within the spiritual tradition of Sophia Perennis, ‘the Everlasting Gospel’. From the standpoint of this great human Norm, our immediate past described by W.B. Yeats as ‘the three provincial centuries’, is a tragic deviation; catastrophic, as Blake believed, in its spiritual and material consequences. Only now do we possess the necessary knowledge to understand William Blake and the ever-growing number of people who turn to him surely justifies his faith in the eternal truths he strove to communicate.

Blake and the new age

RAINE, Kathleen

Literature & Fiction

G. Allen & Unwin

In her introduction Kathleen Raine writes: "There is no major poet who has not also been a man of the highest intelligence, and in consequence, of wide knowledge beyond the frontiers of literature." This Penguin Poetry Library edition, Coleridge: Selected Poetry and Prose, offers 80 pages of poetry (nearly fifty poems) and 200 pages of prose (letters, notes, lectures, and other writings).

Coleridge: Selected Poetry and Prose (Poetry Library, Penguin)

COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR

Literary

Penguin Classics

Dr. Raine's criticism is centered on her belief that it is now the time to reaffirm the language of sacred analogy, and all that is inherent in it, as the proper language of imaginative and creative discourse. Among the essays that comprise this book are perceptive studies of those poets of her contemporaries the author regards as defenders and preservers of the ancient springs of sacred imagination.

Defending Ancient Springs

Oxford U.P.

William Blake (The World of Art Series)

Oxford Uni. Press

The author of this work looks at the poor of the Bible, including individuals such as St. Paul and Mary mother of Jesus. He shows that far from being a negative, poverty can become a tool for evangelism.'

Poor, Therefore Rich: Carthusian Novice Conferences

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

Darton,Longman & Todd

Farewell happy fields;: Memories of childhood

Hamilton

The English romantic poet reflects on her growth as a writer and woman, recalling her university days, personal relationships, and role in the radical literary world of the 1920's and 30's

The land unknown

Biographies & Memoirs

George Braziller

Since her first collection of poems published in 1943, Kathleen Raine has been writing a kind of mystical nature poetry all her own, a poetry immersed in the quiet air of solitude and imagination. Vita Sackville-West, writing in the Observer, spoke of her "curious purity": "Her poems are like drops of water, clear, self-contained, and sometimes iridescent with the elusive colors of mysticism". Collected Poems is the lifework of a visionary, a celebration of the miracles of nature and man's place among them. Now in her ninety-second year she has chosen this work from eleven published collections and from other uncollected and unpublished sources. The earliest poems were written in the mid-thirties, the latest in the late nineties.

Collected poems

Hamish Hamilton

The eminent poet and scholar Kathleen Raine, leading exponent of "the learning of the imagination," brings together all her essays on Yeats (some never before printed) covering many aspects of the traditions and influences that informed his great poetry. In saluting Raine's "magnificent achievement in this rich and learned book," Professor Augustine Martin of University College Dublin states that she "irradiates [Yeats] and every corner of his work. Her unique and unanswerable contribution to Yeatsian criticism is to establish his authority as an immensely learned poet and thinker in the tradition of Plato and the Eternal Philosophy."Contains over 140 illustrations.

Yeats the Initiate: Essays on Certain Themes in the Work of W.B. Yeats

History & Criticism

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Blake and Tradition is an investigation of the sources of Blake's knowledge of the Neoplatonic and Hermetic tradition and allied currents of thought. The volumes contain what was then new information on Blake's vast fund of exact knowledge in these fields, and Kathleen Raine interprets his works in the light of the ideas that originally inspired and informed them.The core of this important work of scholarship formed the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts in 1962 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The expanded, two-volume work was originally published by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1969.

Blake and Tradition

British & Irish

Routledge

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