Autobiographies - Softcover

Raine, Kathleen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1597313327 ISBN 13: 9781597313322

Publisher: Coracle Press, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Coracle Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1597313327
• ISBN 13: 9781597313322
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 386