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1Kathleen Raine: A Voice for the Twenty-First Century is a substantial volume of 292 pages, gathering twelve essays by European and American scholars. It grew out of the 2022 Paris conference dedicated to Raine (1908–2003), an event meant as an homage and marked by a warm, celebratory atmosphere, a tone that unmistakably seeps through the pages of the volume under scrutiny. The editors bring complementary expertise: Claire Garnier-Tardieu, a Professor in Didactics by trade, an expert in Raine by heart, has devoted all her Energy (capital E) to shaping the field of Raine studies in France, while Jessica Stephens is a Senior Lecturer specialising in creative approaches of translation from the Middle Ages to the present. All contributors demonstrate a personal engagement with the poet and her work as well as a certain fondness for the woman and her writings, often through enthusiastic language, as evidenced by the many superlative forms and adjectives like ‘some of her greatest verse’, ‘a work of perfection’, or ‘illuminating’, a language that will undoubtedly warm even the most recalcitrant reader.

2The volume’s twelve chapters explore Raine’s work from a variety of critical perspectives (biographical, philosophical, literary, musical, and even pedagogical) while consistently returning to the overarching question of her relevance to the twenty-first century. In the introduction, Claire Garnier-Tardieu proposes a reading of Raine’s life through her works. Or is it her works through her life? Put together, these works raise the question: ‘What is all the art and poetry of the world but the record of remembered Paradise and the lament of our exile?’ (2). Love, capital L, is the leading argument for Raine’s family, for her poetry, for the men in her life, so much so that the personal and the spiritual cannot be separated, a claim that is evidenced by all the chapters collected in the volume. The first part, which focuses on Raine’s spiritual preoccupations, opens with Joseph Milne’s exploration of how Raine ‘sought to reconcile this sense of a universal tradition with Western Philosophy as represented by the works of Plato and Plotinus and how such an endeavour challenges our Modernity’ (15). In chapter 2, Grevel Lindop offers extremely valuable close readings that trace Raine’s struggle with the legacies of Romanticism and Modernism. In chapter 3, Claire Garnier-Tardieu turns to Farewell Happy Fields (1973), The Land Unknown (1975), and The Lion’s Mouth (1977) illustrating how personal circumstances and myths are articulated in her autobiographical writings, and enriching her analysis with manuscript illustrations that reveal the poet’s editorial process. The next section addresses Raine’s connection with Neoplatonism. First, Rowan Middleton examines Raine’s ‘poetry of longing’, reading images of doors and passageways as metaphors linking mystical aspiration and lived experience. Then, Gareth Polmeer investigates Raine’s hermeneutics through the concept of ‘participation’, which is defined as the fact that ‘humans do not stand apart from the divine but are instead imbued with a spiritual character’ (106). The concept is not extended to participatory practices either through collaborations with other artists or through the co-construction of meaning in the poem, which would have brought a fresh approach, but there are some interesting developments on how the poetess articulated opposites to reach what she called ‘Epiphany of the commonplace’ (quoted on page 119). Finally, in ‘The Golden Form’, Eric McElroy traces Raine’s fascination with music connecting her Neoplatonism with ‘song settings’ of her poems (138) and with East-West musical dialogues. The third section centres on Raine and nature from a philosophical and literary perspective. Catherine Lanone explores Keatsian undercurrents in Raine’s poetry, especially the myths of Persephone and Psyche, while Andrew Johnston offers a close reading of Living with Mystery (1992) and Cécile Cerf provides an epistemological approach to flowers, one of Raine’s key poetic images. The fourth and last section is one that will be particularly relevant for agrégatifs as it focuses on the figure of Raine as an educator. In chapter 10, Caroline Watson analyses Raine’s two works for children, situating them within a wider tradition of poets’ contributions to children’s literature. In chapter 11, Margot Kuligowska-Esnault offers concrete teaching strategies designed to introduce Raine to teenage students, an important reflection on how poetry might be taught in schools, and a complete pedagogical sequence for future classes. Finally, Jessica Stephens closes the volume with a personal memoir of encounters with Raine. Together, these chapters showcase the breadth of Raine’s oeuvre, which encompasses poetry, autobiography, criticism, children’s stories, and collaborations, while situating her as a prophet of perennial wisdom, committed to keeping ancient traditions alive and relevant for new generations.

3One of the most obvious strengths of the collection is its erudition on all things Raine and the contributors go a long way to justify the subtitle ‘A Voice for the Twenty-First Century’. Indeed, the volume gives an overview of Raine’s oeuvre, treating not only her poems, autobiographies and critical essays but also her children’s stories and musical collaborations. In the process, some of Raine’s lesser known texts, like the poems for the libretto she provided for Bliss’s The Golden Cantata (1964), are used to complicate the straightforward narrative Raine’s meticulously arranged Collected Poems tells (in the case of the libretto, it shows that the female poet is profoundly connected to song). It also succeeds in demonstrating how Raine worked towards a synthesis of many poetic and spiritual trends, structuring them around geographical coordinates like the North and London, recurring motifs such as the tree or more occasional ones like flowers. Asphodels, hyacinths, and anemones; water lilies, Ilford roses and currants; snowdrops and tulips do not so much make up a beautiful backdrop or millefleur to the poems but suggest an empathetic relationship with nature and provide fitting examples of Raine’s Neoplatonism. Indeed, the poet draws on this version of Platonic philosophy to present the visible world as a symbolic reflection of a higher spiritual reality, emphasising the soul’s ascent toward divine unity through imagination, beauty, and nature. The essays not only give a clear understanding of how coherent and consistent Raine’s work is in the sense that it synthesises Platonism and Neoplatonism with Sophia perennis, Eastern philosophy, and other beliefs, but they also display the same kind of erudition in unfolding these spiritual frameworks. The biographical approach, based on Raine’s writings and on writings on Raine, and fed with first-hand anecdotes, emphasises lived experience as a way to access her oeuvre, which is in keeping with the poet’s own beliefs. For instance, five chapters mention Raine’s meeting with, unrequited love for and separation from naturalist Gavin Maxwell as a way to illuminate her idea that kindred spirits transcend material reality. Finally, the collection has a strong pedagogical relevance, especially for the agrégation students, who will find close readings and strong textual analyses throughout the chapters.

4The essays discuss Raine’s intellectual sources and thematic preoccupations, but they seldom engage with how her voice (literal and literary) rings to contemporary readers outside these important pedagogical settings. For instance, Raine seems to have been speaking with an accent that can be said to match the Received Pronunciation, this phonetic and ideological construct that may have been a way to climb the social ladder in the past but is now under suspicion of supporting an élite’s worldview that is exclusive of many citizens. Lindop, recalling a reading in 1973, notes: ‘those who heard her read this poem [‘Change’] may still recall the slight chill—almost a shiver—that would pass through the room as she completed the fourth stanza’ (54). Would the voice of the prophet electrify an audience more attuned to the rhythms of accented Englishes today? Would she gain a special type of listening due to the queerness this RP accent would now introduce? The issue of Raine as a public reader, and how her actual voice shaped not only her reception but also canon formation, is left open. Besides, in the introduction, Claire Garnier-Tardieu claims that Raine’s autobiographical writings provide ‘a powerful analytical grid for the poetic work’, and it sometimes seems like the contributors are reluctant to use their own tools, their own voices or to put Raine’s work to the test of more contemporary critical thinking. Ecocriticism, Material studies, Plant studies . . . are all hinted at but not explored as potential guides to a deeper understanding of Raine’s poetry, even though it makes it clear that her mysticism is a response to the materialist and ecological crisis she witnessed. Additionally, the book hesitates to situate Raine critically within broader debates on modernity. Because of that, Raine ‘is to be counted among the moderns’, a label which is equated with ‘the Modernists’ like ‘Eliot, Pound, or Yeats’ (178). In fact, I would argue that Raine is profoundly ‘antimodern’ in the sense conceptualised by Antoine Compagnon’s 2005 eponymous work: ‘les antimodernes [sont] les modernes en délicatesse avec les Temps Modernes, le modernisme ou la modernité.’ / The antimoderns are the moderns who are at odds with the Modern Age, with modernism, or with modernity (9, my translation). In his study, Compagnon establishes a series of correspondences between a worldview (such as the hatred of the Enlightenment and the idea of original sin, among others), certain affects (like melancholy and nostalgia), and a style, i.e. a register (the sublime) and a related rhetorical figure (hyperbole). In this sense, Raine’s mysticism is essentially antimodern, since it does not concern itself with the world as it is and distances itself from the poetic avant-garde. Like Blake, she exhibits a resistance to anything modern which paradoxically makes her modern. So much so that we could paraphrase Marc Porée’s beautiful lines about Blake and say that ‘Raine utilise l’ensemble des dispositifs, bien au-delà d’une forme poétique particulière, que la modernité a dû abandonner pour se tendre. Violemment antimoderne en cela, Blake résiste à la fin de ces dispositifs en y opposant la résonance de la parole poétique.’ / Raine uses a whole range of devices, far beyond any particular poetic form, which modernity had to abandon in order to define itself. In this, Blake is violently anti-modern: he resists the demise of these devices by opposing to it the resonance of poetic speech (my translation). Her mysticism in particular is essentially antimodern, insofar as it rejects the world as it is and takes its distance from avant-garde poetics. This brings her closer to one of her contemporaries, namely Ted Hughes (1930–1998), who seems to have narrowly beaten her to the position of Poet Laureate in 1984. In a letter to Raine read at the Whitbread Book of the Year Awards in January 1999, Hughes wrote that Birthday Letters brought ‘a sense of inner liberation, a huge sudden possibility of new inner experience. Quite strange’ (quoted in Skea, Moulin, 65), a phrasing that shows a sort of spiritual kindred. They had a common interest in magic and the primacy of imagination, esoteric philosophy, even though they probably had very different views on Christianism and neo-romanticism. Yet this complex positioning (her prophetic voice, her relation to ancient beliefs and eschatological poets) deserves more explicit theorisation.

5In the end, Kathleen Raine: A Voice for the Twenty-First Century is a must-read as it provides a very helpful entry into the world Raine has patiently carved for herself. The contributors’ engagement with and admiration for her works, which are too rarely found in critical analysis, make a powerful case for Raine as a poet who interrogates modernity and whose prophetic voice continues to resonate. At the same time, the volume opens many further paths to explore, and we can only hope readers and academics will take these paths in the future.