Golgonooza, City of Imagination

"Raine was a poet, and—for me—a transformative Blake scholar. I remember going to Tate Britain at one point when they had new acquisitions of Blake work and being very dissatisfied with the descriptions of these new works. It was almost as if the curator didn’t quite know what they had bought. That made me turn to Kathleen Raine’s books on Blake, because she offers a complicated but nonetheless clear explanation of where Blake’s images are coming from and where he can be situated in the Neo-Platonic tradition. You don’t have to buy that wholeheartedly to be glad that Kathleen Raine has opened up the deep meaning of these images and allowed you to question that, and to appreciate Blake seriously, not just as some strange, whimsical genius in a world of his own. So I’ve always been glad of Raine’s work, and this book of lectures of hers is fascinating. It’s as if she, too, is speaking from another world. There’s something of the spirit of Blake in her that is deeply attractive; you’re receiving from Blake at multiple levels when you read Kathleen Raine. Yes, she wrote three or four books, gave talks, and founded the Temenos Academy too, a group that reads not just Blake’s texts but others like The Divine Comedy, the Bhagavad Gita, other Upanishads texts as well. She felt that Blake was part of this tradition, which she has described as a river flowing underground, constantly throwing up springs. The living water is felt in the work of figures like Blake. So, yes, Blake drew her not just academically, but because she thought that in him could be felt this timeless tradition that needs to be renewed in every generation."