RAINE, KATHLEEN

born June 14, 1908, London, Eng. in full Kathleen Jessie Raine poet and critic noted for her mystical and visionary poetry. Raine studied the natural sciences at Girton College, Cambridge (M.A., 1929), and in the 1930s was one of a group of Cambridge poets. Her gift for exactness of observation and precision of diction is evident in her first book of poems, Stone and Flower (1943), as well as in her later poetry. Her work, which has been characterized as meditative and lyrical, is concerned with universal themes such as nature, life, death, and eternity. Raine's many volumes of poems include The Pythoness (1949), The Hollow Hill (1965), The Lost Country (1971), On a Deserted Shore (1973), The Oval Portrait (1977), The Oracle in the Heart, and Other Poems, 19751978 (1980), Collected Poems, 19351980 (1981), The Presence: Poems 198487 (1987), Autobiographies (1991), and Living with Mystery (1992). Among her critical works are Blake and Tradition, 2 vol. (1968), From Blake to a Vision (1978), The Human Face of God: William Blake and the Book of Job (1982), and Yeats the Initiate (1986). Four volumes of autobiography are Farewell Happy Fields (1973), The Land Unknown (1975), The Lion's Mouth (1977), and India Seen Afar (1989).