RAINE, Kathleen (Jessie) 1908-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born June 14, 1908, in Ilford, Essex, England; died July 6, 2003, in London, England. Author. Raine was a prizewinning British poet, critic, editor, and translator who was an authority on nineteenth-century writers William Blake and William Butler Yeats. Educated at Girton College, Cambridge, where she studied psychology and the social sciences and earned a master's degree in 1929, she worked various jobs after graduation and became interested in Celtic culture and spiritualism. Her interest in spiritualism and philosophy imbues much of her poetry, beginning with the collection Stone and Flower: Poems, 1935-1943 (1943). Raine continued her verse writing, publishing the books The Pythoness and Other Poems (1948) and The Hollow Hill and Other Poems, 1960-1964 (1965), but she also built a reputation for her scholarly nonfiction work, including William Blake (1969) and the seminal two-volume study Blake and Tradition (1968, second edition, 2002, as Blake and Antiquity). After writing for several decades, Raine's popularity as a poet suddenly rose in the 1970s. Building on this success she founded the Temenos Academy of Integral Studies, where students were instructed in the philosophies and religions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism; in conjunction with this institution she also founded and edited the journal Temenos from 1981 to 1992. Honored with prizes that included the Cholmondeley Award, the French foreignbook prize, and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize, Raine's many other works include the poetry collections The Lost Country (1971), The Oracle in the Heart, and Other Poems, 1975-1978 (1980), and Living with Mystery: Poems, 1987-1991 (1992); the nonfiction works Blake and the New Age (1979), Poetry and the Frontiers of Consciousness (1985), and W. B. Yeats and the Learning of the Imagination (1999); and the autobiographical Faces of Day and Night (1972), Farewell Happy Fields: Memories of Childhood (1973), and The Land Unknown (1975). Raine was also an editor and translator of numerous other works. For her many literary contributions, she was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a commander of the Order of the British Empire, and commander of the French Ordré des Arts et des Lettres.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Writers Directory, 18th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2003.

PERIODICALS

Independent (London, England), July 8, 2003, p. 16.

Los Angeles Times, July 12, 2003, p. B20.

New York Times, July 10, 2003, p. C14.

Times (London, England), July 8, 2003.

Washington Post, July 12, 2003, p. B7.