Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Kathleen Raine
-
Standard Name: Raine, Kathleen
Birth Name: Kathleen Jessie Raine
Married Name: Kathleen Jessie Davies
Married Name: Kathleen Jessie Madge
KR
's lengthy, successful career as twentieth-century poet, autobiographer, essayist, critic, and translator, won her many awards in England and other countries. She called the writing of words (especially poetry) her greatest joy. Paradoxically, it is the written word which communicates from heart to heart, not the spoken word; for our most secret knowledge comes to us in solitude.
Raine, Kathleen. The Written Word. Enitharmon Press, 1967.
3
For KR
, mythology and nature were modes for illuminating psychic development. The core of women's creativity lay in the development of a self, needing both spiritual and human relationships.
RP
knew T. S. Eliot
well enough to enjoy a courtly encounter with him at a bus stop, but she felt his great innovations had not necessarily been a good thing for English poetry, and...
Kathleen Raine
later called this friendship a relationship of teacher to pupil, but one where neither the giving nor the receiving is all on one side. It possessed, she said, that magical quality which belongs...
Its chapters are allotted to its various characters by name. A quotation, acknowledged in the preliminary pages, comes from Worry about Money by Kathleen Raine
(from The Pythoness, and Other Poems, 1949). This book...
Intertextuality and Influence
Virginia Woolf
The original audience included Q. D. Roth (later Leavis)
and Kathleen Raine
. Women writers who later counted it an important influence on them included such disparate figures as Muriel Box
and Rumer Godden
...
Literary responses
Frances Bellerby
Kathleen Raine
highly praised this volume.
Gittings, Robert, and Frances Bellerby. “Introduction”. Selected Poems, edited by Anne Stevenson and Anne Stevenson, Enitharmon Press, 1986.
38
Literary responses
Elizabeth Jennings
She held bursaries or grants from the Arts Council
(after the initial one for her first book) in 1965, 1968, and 1972.
“Lauinger Library: Special Collections Division”. Georgetown University Library.
Some critics disparage EJ
's work along lines effectively summarized by Robert Crawford
Literary responses
T. S. Eliot
George Orwell
no doubt spoke for a section of Eliot's readership when he wrote in October 1942 of the first three quartets: There is very little in Eliot's later work that makes any deep impression...
Literary responses
Dorothy Wellesley
Kathleen Raine
, though she called DW
a minor poet, a not always perceptive judge of Yeats's poems, also gave her credit as the champion of an unfashionable view of poetry, whose revelation of Yeats's...
Material Conditions of Writing
William Empson
WE
began publishing his poetry as a Cambridge
undergraduate during the years up to 1928 (as did others in the same group at the same time, including Kathleen Raine
). He edited and published his...
Occupation
William Empson
WE
was an enthusiast for Basic English (a simplified form of the language which he favoured not only for exchanges among scientists and others from different language groups, but also as an introduction to the...
Publishing
Jeni Couzyn
In the late 1960s a male friend of JC
passed on to her a commission for an anthology of love poems by women. The publisher had delicate lyrics in mind, and was horrified at Couzyn's...
Timeline
16 January 1929
The Listener began publication; it has been said that it did more for the new 'thirties poetry in Britain than any of the specialized poetry magazines.
Early 1936
The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts
(who was put forward for this task by T. S. Eliot
), set out to define the modern movement, not just chronologically but according...
1960
Gavin Maxwell
issued his best-known book, about otters on Cambusfearna (that is Sandaig, an island off Western Scotland), entitled Ring of Bright Water (from a line by Kathleen Raine
: He has married me...
