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Against the nihil
One candle-flame, one blade of grass,
One thought suffices
To affirm all.
KATHLEEN RAINE has been so lucid and indispensable a commentator on the work of Blake, Yeats, and other poets, and so devoted a defender and teacher of their tradition, that a reader of her own poetry may be led astray by preconceptions. I have to admit, anyhow, that my early reading of Kathleen Raine was made awkward by my supposition that I would find her to be more like, or more akin to, Blake or Yeats than in fact she is.
Of course this sort of confusion is embarrassing whenever it occurs, because it is correctable by recognition of an obvious truth: being a poet oneself is nothing like studying the work of other poets, closely allied with them as one may be. However learned one may become in the lineages of thought or faith or art that sustain one's life and work, one must approach every new work of one's own as a sort of innocent, trying to see what truth, old and long-honored though it is, might be found shining anew in the places, events, companions, and memories of one's own life.
The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine (published in England in 2000 by Golgonooza Press and in the United States in 2001 by Counterpoint), more I think than most books, is the record of the struggle of its own making. It has been a complicated and a momentous struggle, and to say what it has involved and accomplished may at the same time provide an accurate enough evaluation of the book.
From early in her life Kathleen Raine's vocation pretty
© 2001 by Wendell Berry
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clearly was to become a poet of religious vision—or, more precisely, a poet of Imagination in the high sense in which Blake used that term: the “Divine Humanity,” the “Poetic Genius,” the “Spirit of Prophecy,” the power of inspiration, the vision of eternal things, our means of conversing with Paradise. The power of Imagination is to see things in their eternal aspect; it is to know the timeless as it “moves through time,” the eternal presence that is both in and outside time and that comprehends the things we know...