Kathleen Raine on poetry and life

Kathleen Raine

                                                     

Kathleen Raine's Autobiographies (1991) is made up of her three earlier autobiographical books published in the mid-1970s. I always underline passages in books that I am reading and I underlined passages--single words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs--in Raine's book; later, it occurred to me to compile some of these passages on this blog, these are passages that deal with poetry and being a poet. But typing out these passages today I was surprised at Raine's prescient references to the dark age in which we now live. This is even more pertinent today when the world of order and stability seems to be unraveling; the old order is passing away and the new order seems barbaric and chaotic, anarchic in its worst sense, and everywhere we see the disintegration of values, order, and stability. The barbarians are entering the city and we, the inhabitants, know they have no good intentions for us, they want to destroy us and everything we represent. At least, that is how it seems in the days post October 7th when terrorists invaded Israel intent on killing, mutilating, and raping women, and then celebrating and advertising their violence. But I digress from Kathleen Raine’s Autobiographies; it is a beautifully written book and it should be of interest to those who want to know more about Raine's life, poetry, and ideas about life.

                                      29 December 2023

Kathleen Raine on poetry and life:

My mother did not send me to school until I was six years old; and if I have been a poet I owe it to my mother's protection of my sanctuary of solitude in those years of early childhood when three small fields between the advancing fringe of London's East-End suburbs, and the wooden fence of Dr. Bernardo's Homes was space enough for earthly Paradise. (p. 50)

Conversely, in order to escape the silent demands of dignified and beautiful proportions, barbarians must desecrate and violate, smash the stained glass and deface the statues and paint defiant slogans on walls that tell us too clearly, in their beauty and harmony of proportion, that we might be better than we are. (p, 120)

Strange (so it seems to me, writing in 1974 of my youth nearly fifty years ago) that the very premises of civilization should stand in need of defense. (p. 123)

Let me say here, since I use the term the 'soul' very often, that I am perfectly aware of the possible alternatives, such as psyche, brain, drive, complex, ego, and the behaviousistic terms . . . I believed in the soul as that specifically human life in us of which the body is the vehicle. It seemed then self-evident that this represents our 'higher' nature, and no less self-evident that what passes in that living consciousness--that being in us which we immediately feel to be our 'I am"--is of greater import than our physical functions. The experiences of the soul, for good or ill, I still supposed made up the matter of poetry; and indeed of all the arts, these being the expression and the record of the soul's knowledge. (p. 138-139)

But I have been able to speak from my heart only in my poems. (p. 325)

...--and I do not enjoy that dropping of barriers of the world where 'poets' (usually very minor ones, for any serious artist must live a life in some sense disciplined) move to a kind of promiscuous gregariousness. ... The poet must protect his wildness as best he may, with whatever, camouflage he can create; a principle inherited from the shy animal world from a millennial past. And for a poet whose theme was the city, the city, also must be his protective disguise. (p. 329)

Art is the city of the soul. (p. 339)

I can now myself say that I have learned nothing from experience, from my mistakes, from trial and error, or from the mere passage of time: only through rifts in these clouds, as if from another order of knowledge altogether. Tragedies, after all, however nobly enacted and grandly endured, are, as seen by wisdom, the storms of illusion, the webs woven in ignorance and passion by those who 'do but slenderly know themselves'. In tragedy we can finally admire only the grandeur of humanity's never abandoned struggle to attain the moment of transcendence; without which there can be no catharsis, no liberation. (p. 344)

Of all the teachers of my generation I am perhaps most indebted to Jung. ... for Jung points the way to a living access to the originals of which myths and symbols of religion are formulations. (p. 351)

In the generation before my own, T.S. Eliot remained within the tradition he would have wished to see continue; he, and David Jones, were perhaps the last poets of that tradition. Yeats saw the darkness approaching, the tide rising; but his hope lay not in any turning or stemming of the tide, but in that which lies beyond civilization, the mystery of the gyres, the Indian Brahman whose outbreathings create worlds and whose inbreathings withdraw them from existence. But Yeats too was still among the artificers of Byzantium, the Graeco-Christian civilization, preserved in Ireland beyond its time elsewhere. It is my generation which has seen the end. (p. 356)

The great tree is at this time showering down its leaves in a process of death which cannot be arrested, and whose record is everywhere to be read in the nihilism of the arts, of social life, in a thousand images of disintegration, in the reversion of civilized society, it may be, to a state of barbarism. (p. 356)

But since it has been above all poetic truth I have followed, tried to discover always that good, that best Socrates never ceased to speak of, poetic justice it must have been (the only kind I have ever acknowledged) that brought me at last to stand my judgement in Greece itself. (p. 357)

The poets are always blamed, more or less, for the same thing: they are ruthless, or that which drives them is. (p. 363)

Raine, Kathleen. Autobiographies. San Rafael, Coracle Press, 1991.

To the Muses, by William Blake

 

                                        Whether on Ida's shady brow,
                                        Or in the chambers of the East,
                                        The chambers of the sun, that now
                                        From ancient melody have ceas'd;

                                        Whether in Heav'n ye wander fair,
                                        Or the green corners of the earth,
                                        Or the blue regions of the air,
                                        Where the melodious winds have birth;

                                        Whether on crystal rocks ye rove,
                                        Beneath the bosom of the sea
                                        Wand'ring in many a coral grove,
                                        Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry!

                                        How have you left the ancient love
                                        That bards of old enjoy'd in you!
                                        The languid strings do scarcely move!
                                        The sound is forc'd, the notes are few!

William Blake, Poetical Sketches (London, 1783)

The Garden Myth

Bee balm in our garden, summer 2021

If there is a myth that speaks most directly to my experiences in life it is the Garden Myth, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. I first learned of this from William Blake by way of Northrop Frye; we have all fallen from the innocence of childhood into a dark forest of experience, a state of self-consciousness. What can be done about this? Is there redemption? Is there a religious experience that will free one from suffering? What is the answer? How do we do it? Christianity? Buddhism? Carl Jung? Krishnamurti? 

__________________

There is a mythological basis to all of my work; the work, the poetry, returns to a central story, a myth. A myth is also a way of looking at one's place in the cosmos, of finding one's spiritual place, of understanding one's life. Finding one's myth is not so much discovering something new as it is rediscovering something that is essential to one's inner life; a myth gives order to one's life, it explains events, it is the foundation of one's experienced life. A myth is the soul's story and the soul loves a narrative, specificity, and order. The Garden Myth, the fall from innocence into experience, is the basis of my writing.

 

The Great Reconfiguration

Taken while driving over the old Champlain Bridge

For some of us, there is a single moment when our lives changed radically, when life was reconfigured. Life was one thing and then, a moment later, it was something else. For some of us, this is how change occurs, not a slow progression but a sudden reconfiguration of everything that constituted our “life.” It may take years, even a lifetime, to understand this sudden, radical change; it may take years for the full consequences of this change--what I have termed the "Great Reconfiguration"-- to make itself known to us, but eventually it does become known.

I was a six year old child with two parents and a brother. We lived a middle-class life in a middle-class neighbourhood. Life was not perfect because of my father’s bad health, but it was, by 1950s standards, a “normal” life. Then, my father died on November 16, 1956, and my life as I knew it was over. All of the family dynamics changed. I was now a child whose father had died, a child in a one-parent home. I cannot impress on you too much the radical changes in my life that occurred because my father’s death. The whole family was affected by his death. It has affected my entire life and it has been the Great Reconfiguration of my life. It probably made me into the poet I am today, someone who is obsessive, filled with grief, regret, and failure, preoccupied with death, and always concerned with the spiritual side of life.

Silence fell on our house after my father died. His death was met with silence; he became a topic I always felt uncomfortable about and unable to discuss. I was ashamed that he had died. I was now different from all of my friends. I was never consoled in my child`s grief but met with silence; I was expected to deal with my grief by myself. This was not a home where we shared fond and loving memories of my father, it was a home in which the man who is my father was not mentioned. There were no trips to the cemetery to visit his grave, there was just silence, and it was decades before I visited where he is buried.

I will always remember lying in bed as a six year old child, praying to God that my father come home. I will always remember the little toy train engine, powered by batteries, my mother brought home for me from Boston when my father was in hospital there. Someone, perhaps a cousin, stepped on it almost as soon as I received it and broke the wheels; and then the engine, because it had a light on it, became a light I took to bed with me. It was, as I remember, when the toy train was given to me that my mother told me, only a day or a few days after my father had died, “It is better this way, it is better that he not suffer.” And that was the end of that.

No wonder, at university only thirteen years later, when I read William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” and Isak Dinesen’s wonderful short story “Sorrow Acre,” I found the single myth that was to preoccupy and define my life for many years. It was the biblical story of the Garden Myth, the fall from innocence into experience. It was a myth, a psychological truth, that described my own great reconfiguration. It was the event that saw the beginning of the end of my childhood puer existence and the birth of my senex concerns; it was the event in which I was conceived as a poet and the person I am today, many years older. It was the birth of my soul as a poet.

The Great Reconfiguration affects every aspect of one’s life and unless you have undergone such a radical re-organization of your life, it is difficult to understand how life changing a single experience can be. This new organization of life variables created for me a life I probably would not have had if my father had not died. Almost every aspect—I believe every aspect—of my existence was changed into something other than what it had been only seconds before his death. My life was made harder, I was given a challenge that most children do not receive at age six years. It was the challenge to understand the impermanence of life. To do this, I turned to writing poetry. Poetry was my calling in life, a calling that was presented to me by necessity, by the grief and experience of my father`s death. What my life would been like otherwise is impossible to say, that life that was denied is gone, never to have been. It is only with the perspective of age that I see these events as clearly as I now do; this life journey I am on became something different from what it could have been, it has made this journey difficult but certainly interesting.