Kathleen Raine, almost a Traditionalist

A new study of the poet Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) has just been published: Jenny Messenger, Kathleen Raine: Classics and Consciousness (Bloomsbury 2025). This supplements the “authorized biography” by Philippa Bernard, No End to Snowdrops: A Biography of Kathleen Raine (Shepheard Walwyn 2012). 

Raine was almost a Traditionalist, and it is interesting to explore how she differed from the Traditionalists on whom this blog focuses. She was a perennialist and worked (in her own words) to “reaffirm the Perennial Philosophy which, like an underground river, has flowed through all civilizations and all ages, and wherever it sends up springs and fountains, Beauty and Wisdom have flowered.” She was well versed in the work of Ananda Coomaraswamy, René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, and in Messenger’s view built on their work, though it is not explained quite how. She also worked with individual Traditionalists in England. Her Temenos journal (now the Temenos Academy Review) was established with the help of Keith Critchlow, Brian Keeble and Philip Sherrard, all of whom were probably Maryamis. Speakers at her Temenos Academy have included many Traditionalists. Raine also disliked the modern world, and—like many but not all Traditionalists—was a scholar who was somewhat on the margins of the mainstream, since she insisted that the important thing about ancient texts was their meaning for people today, more than their place in the historical context.

Several things make Raine different, however. One is that although she disliked the modern world, she did not systematically attack it or develop a theoretical basis for condemning it. Another is that she admired and studied two (relatively) modern figures, William Blake and W. B. Yeats. Then come her ancient sources: Plato and the Neoplatonists, who the Traditionalists have generally ignored—wrongly, in my view, since the Sufi philosophy that Traditionalists have studied with such attention contains much that is derived from Neoplatonism. As Messenger puts it,

She did not view eastern religions and philosophies as entirely hers, however. Hinduism and Buddhism were not her culture or tradition, she felt. Plato and Plotinus, enfolded within the grand arc of Western civilization, were – despite the fact that the Neoplatonists were not at all ‘western’ and instead were from places like Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.

Finally, Raine was a woman, which—for some reason I have never understand—none of the major figures in the Traditionalist movement have been.