Sewanee Review

Some months before she died, in 2003, Kathleen Raine remarked to me, “It means nothing to be a poet in this country today.” This was said in a tone of voice such as one might use to declare an outcome of events to which one has no connection or interest. Given the relatively high, public profile poetry now has, the poet’s observation might appear to be something of a misperception. But it was meant not so much as an observation as a judgment. This poet had in her sights the type of poetry that is the natural expression of what she called “quantitative culture”: that is demotic in spirit, individualistic in expression, and materialist in its comprehension. At the beginning of her essay “The Use of the Beautiful” Raine speaks of such verse as seeming “to set itself no goal beyond description, sometimes pleasing, but just as often of displeasing things seen or felt. I doubt if anything is to be learned from such descriptions or from the self-expression of the subjective states reflected in so much current verse. Far from expanding our [End Page 117] consciousness, we have often, on the contrary, in order to understand such states to make ourselves smaller, like Alice, before we can get inside such mean rooms as are opened to us.” For Kathleen Raine, as for her master, William Blake, there was never any doubt as to what it takes to be a poet: “One Power alone makes a poet—Imagination, The Divine Vision.” This stipulation is unconditional and proposes that the vocation of the poet is a very high one indeed. Could anything be more at odds with the conception of poetry so widely practiced today?

In the context of a culture that itself reflects the metaphysical depreciation of history, and that functions to all intents and purposes from within a worldview that has, over many centuries, gradually emptied the natural world of its symbolic resonances, the defense of a metaphysical poet’s work must seem like a long-lost cause. Poetry now seems almost exclusively to be concerned with observing and recording private reactions to what is called “the real world”—a world for which any regard for metaphysical reality must seem like an obsolete attachment to the remote abstractions of prescientific speculation. But, as the poet records in her essay on John Donne, “metaphysical … is a wholly misleading word … Metaphysical poetry is the least abstract, most concrete of all poetry.” What follows here, then, might be thought of as an attempt to rehabilitate the validity of metaphysical poetry by means of an examination of the very heart of Kathleen Raine’s imaginative vision.

At this point I must insert a proviso: in what follows little will be said (except, of course, by implication) to argue the case for the literary status of Kathleen Raine’s achievement. No such status can be established before there is an understanding of the appropriate range and depth of her work as a whole. And no such understanding has so far been reached. That being so, my intention will be to focus on the type of knowledge and insight that must be brought to a reading of her poems.

At the beginning of her essay on Edwin Muir, Kathleen Raine speaks of those “accidental circumstances of the moment” that furnish the poet with something of the substance with which a poem is made. Such moments can, at the time of its creation, make a poem seem “alive” and “to the point.” But time itself can all too quickly diminish what once seemed a poem’s very life-blood. Time, here as elsewhere, is an unsparing judge. English poetry today seems largely wedded to the conviction that to record the ephemera of private feelings and the observation of commonplace experience must be the natural and only substance of poetry, expressed in appropriately colloquial language. But to Raine—as she points out in her essay “On the Symbol”—“nothing seems more unnatural, in the art of poetry, than ‘natural’ diction, common speech, the conversational tone.”

In a short essay “The...