Away From Politics with Kathleen Raine (Then Back Again)

The 2024 election had a revelatory feel. The campaign rhetoric, for example, was almost unprecedented in its uncompromising vehemence. By the end, prominent Democrats were openly calling presidential candidate Donald Trump and his supporters fascists and Nazis. Elon Musk, in support of Donald Trump, said repeatedly that if the Democrats won, it would usher in an era of one-party rule and political ruin. “Very few Americans realize that if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election.” The severity of such accusations suggests something dramatic afoot in our politics. And in comparison to his approach to the presidency in 2017, Trump this time around seems to be aiming for serious change in our governance, not least by surrounding himself with people deeply critical of the status quo: J. D. Vance, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Elon Musk, as well as others. That this mini coalition of restive minds could take shape was revealing in itself. In a similar way, so too was the Cheney migration, with Dick and Liz lining up behind Vice-President Harris. Odd portents in a time of shifting grounds.

However, if the political season has been revelatory, it was only partially so. Many citizens sense that something has been collapsing in our political midst and the 2024 campaign reinforced that notion. But what? Perhaps it is only the Obama Ascendancy, with its extension in the Biden years. Or perhaps the thing falling apart is the relatively progressive consensus that has held sway for decades now, upheld by most of America’s leadership class. Then again, what is collapsing might be the very foundations (if that is the right word) of liberal government, as the post-liberals suggest? And as to what direction the country follows next, who can say. For the present, this too is very uncertain.

It has been exhilarating in its way to watch this election and its aftermath, but it has been frustrating as well. So much seems unsettled, so much up for grabs. This unsettled feeling has left me craving nourishment far from the daily fix for news junkies, something closer to what Ezra Pound called “the news that stays news.” And one writer who takes readers about as far from our journalism as possible is Kathleen Raine, poet, literary scholar, and author of a remarkable autobiography.

Born in 1908 and surviving until 2003, she lived, for all intents, through the whole of the twentieth century. However, she could almost claim a much longer life, so distant was the world of her childhood from that of her later years. (Her friend and fellow poet Edwin Muir, for similar reasons, claimed to have lived 150 years rather than the 71 measured by the calendar.) When young she lived in the Northumberland countryside, and her fondest memories were from that time, saturated with the experience of the natural world and the life of a nearby village. Raine also absorbed a bounty of legends, ballads, and historical lore from her Scottish mother. Even when older, she retained a strong feel for this lost world, despite her immersion in intellectual currents that swept in a very different direction. Raine’s father, by contrast, provided young Kathleen with a very different legacy. He was a schoolmaster and Methodist lay preacher who made sure Raine learned her Shakespeare and her Scripture. But his religious feeling, while strong, tended toward moral uplift and social improvement. In comparison with the poetry of her mother’s Scottish heritage, Mr. Raine’s Methodism seemed colorless and at times even repellent to young Kathleen.

Whatever the differences between mother and father, they were united in wanting their precocious daughter to further her education. With their encouragement, Raine entered Cambridge University’s all-women’s Girton College as a scholarship student. And it was there in the 1920s that she first felt the power of those movements sweeping away the sort of culture she knew and embraced. Of special importance to Cambridge’s identity at the time was the reputation of the Cavendish Laboratory, home to the university’s science programs and some of the world’s best physicists. The Lab’s prestige was such that its ethos shaped the thinking of programs around the university. Not least, its influence was reflected in the philosophical positivism of Bertrand Russell, who cast a long shadow at the university and far beyond.

But of greater importance to the young Raine was how the intellectual climate at Cambridge affected the study of literature. Her own attitude, especially toward poetry, was largely traditional and uncomplicated by theory. She loved poetry and accepted it as a distillation of life into its essences: the purest loves, hatreds, and braveries, as in the Borderland ballads or the plays of Shakespeare. The best poetry, by re-presenting these distillations, not only allows individuals to enjoy them as entertainment, but draws society as a whole into a world where we participate in the deepest of human realities. “[T]rue poetry has the power of transforming consciousness itself by holding before us icons, images of forms only partially and superficially realized in ‘ordinary life’” (That Wondrous Pattern, 145).

What Raine found at Cambridge was thoroughly at odds with this view. Rather than looking to literature as an opening to a reality more profound than ordinary experience, she found that literature itself was subjected to a critical examination that denied, root and branch, the whole basis of her previous embrace of literature. It was the victory of the prosaic, in effect, over the iconic. During her time at Cambridge, she wrote, “I discovered that the beauties I had hitherto found in Milton and the Romantics were not of the imagination, but imaginary; it was I who had failed to understand that where I thought I had seen beauty, there was none” (Autobiographies, 130).

One telling aspect of literary criticism at Cambridge was an unwillingness to enter sympathetically into the culture that actually produced the literature in the first place. Instead, the pioneers of that new approach, including Cantabrigians I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, emphasized that a poem should be approached simply as “words on the page,” and treated, emphatically, out of the context in which it was written: “Never mind the past, or the poet, read the poem word by word and register your own responses,” as Raine summed it up (That Wondrous Pattern, 82). Leavis, she notes, edited a magazine, titled Scrutiny and she commented on “how well the word expresses the attitude, carried over from that phase of the natural sciences that murdered to dissect,” an attitude that “rose on the tide of . . . a new religion—scientific materialism” (That Wondrous Pattern, 82).

Given the influence of Cambridge’s intellectual climate, Raine could hardly be immune to its effects. After college, however, and by dint of prolonged effort, she “restructured” her thought, piece by piece and shed the materialism she had absorbed (That Wondrous Pattern, 81). In truth though, the damage done in the first place was limited by the fact that she did not actually study English or any of the humanities while there. Instead, she studied science, specifically botany. And there she found in good measure the beauty she craved. Working amongst the flasks and microscopes, she felt a freedom from the ethos so pronounced at Cambridge. “The marvels of the universe were open to me and I contemplated in awe and delight the Book of Nature.” Most suggestive were the patterns she found in her botanical investigations: the embryology of plants, their life-cycles and transformations, all examples of what Raine called the “condensation of force into form” (Autobiographies, 132).

Unlike her brush with Cambridge’s literary culture, Raine never shed this fascination and insight into the natural world. Years later, while living for a time in the northern English town of Penrith, she had a period of particular sensitivity to it. Moss, poppies, water flowing over stones, clouds in the sky—“all was radiant with . . . interior light,” as she wrote (Autobiographies, 195). She likened this state to a “nature mysticism,” and notes that other poets have felt it as well. (Tennyson, she writes, claimed he could enter such a state at will.) Once, while working at a table on which she had placed a hyacinth, Raine experienced this state with special intensity. As she looked at the flower, she felt her consciousness migrate away from herself and to the hyacinth, until she “was no longer looking at it, but was it . . .” She expanded on the experience:

I was aware of the life of the plant as a slow flow or circulation of a vital current of liquid life of the utmost purity. . . . This dynamic form was, as it seemed, of a spiritual not a material order; or of a finer matter, or of matter itself perceived as spirit. There was nothing emotional about the experience, which was, on the contrary, an almost mathematical apprehension of a complex and organized whole, apprehended as a whole. This whole was living; and as such inspired an immaculate sense of holiness. Living form—that is how I can best name the essence or soul of the plant. (Autobiographies, 195–196)

This intimation of the plant’s deepest life is of a piece with Raine’s mature thought. Matter alone cannot begin to account for itself; prior to the material is a metaphysical dimension that gives matter its “living form,” its reality. Moreover, that metaphysical reality is cosmic: ordered, coherent, and unified. We ourselves are very much a part of the cosmos and its patterns, though, of course, we are distinct in our given nature. It is through our imagination, that most human of capacities, that we see and participate in reality most clearly. And when we see most clearly, we understand reality as holy, worthy of all our reverence.

As for poetry and the arts, it is through them that we best experience and communicate that truth. “Since natural objects are themselves expressions of the formative principle, we must recognize that artists who work from nature, with knowledge of what these forms really are, give no bare representation of the thing seen, but go back to the principles from which nature itself derives. It is when the ideal forms of nature are themselves forgotten, and nature seen as mere opaque matter, that naturalism abandons the first principles of art” (That Wondrous Pattern, 152–153).

It seems odd that Raine, whose work takes us so far from politics, leads us back there if we follow her far enough. Or perhaps it is not so strange. “Civilization,” she once wrote, “is a wholeness, it is the context of human life, it is all or nothing, indivisible, a state of mind” (That Wondrous Pattern, 44). Our political life cannot be separated entirely from our arts, nor can either be separated from nature. She explores these connections in a lengthy audio recording titled Cities of the Imagination, which is actually a compilation of three talks she presented at the Temenos Academy in London, in 1993 and 1994. Of the three, it is the first two that are of most interest here, including “William Blake’s Fourfold Vision of London,” and “Yeats’s Holy City of Byzantium.” Together, they provide a profound meditation on the place of the city, the polis, in the broad scheme of our affairs.

And that place is near the heart of things. As Raine notes, the human story begins in a garden and ends in a city, the New Jerusalem of Revelations. This Jerusalem is the archetype of our ultimate destiny. For the present, however, the city is the theater of our highest striving, which always is and must be communal. Cities are where human labors take on a special concentration: “These works embody our deepest knowledge and sublimest visions, and in turn serve to awaken their inhabitants to know ourselves as participants in that invisible kingdom we ever seek to embody” (Cities of the Imagination, 1:30–2:15). The material dimensions of this effort are apparent when we look at virtually any city. If nothing else, they are marvels of engineering. Among other feats, there are elaborate systems to bring food, water, electricity, and transportation to every corner. But spiritual aspirations are also manifest in cities. How many ignore the soul-deep appeal of memorials, parks, public art and other efforts toward a shared grace? Only the city, as Raine believed, brings so many varied aspects of human aspiration together in one place: “The city is . . . a great energy of creation at work. It comprises not architecture alone, but painting, music, poetry, schools and universities, works of science, all expressions in things great and small which embody our inner and create our outer worlds” (Cities of the Imagination, 4:00–4:30).

Raine calls on William Blake to clarify the way in which our inner worlds create the outer ones. Of special importance is Blake’s belief in the four-fold nature of man: In our fullness, we have senses, feelings, reason, and vision, or imagination. Denial or suppression of any of these will warp us as individuals, frustrating the inner order of our being. Moreover, what is true of the person is correspondingly true of the polis, that most human of creations. Yet for Blake there is a hierarchy among the four, and the capacity for vision is primary. Raine quotes him to this effect: “It is the arts of the imagination that build great civilizations”; and, “It is not arts that follow and attend upon empire, but empires that follow and attend upon the arts” (Cities of the Imagination, 6:30–7:00). The ends of any polis that aims toward greatness, and all do in some way, must first exist in the imaginations of its people.

Which raises a crucial question. If that is true and politics flow from the imagination, can we simply create any future we care to imagine? And if not, why not? To clarify, Raine uses the term imaginal, coined by philosopher Henry Corbin. The imaginal rises in our imagination, but is not merely made up. In contrast, the imaginal engages reality but encounters it though the imagination—the only way to get to the heart of things in any case. Those depths remain inaccessible to both the made up and to reductionist mindsets, materialist or otherwise.

Without losing touch with the inmost being of things, the imaginal provides the medium through which we create our culture, and ultimately our political life. To illustrate, Raine draws on another of her masters, William Butler Yeats, and his engagement with Byzantium, a city that loomed large in his own imagination. One sees how in his poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” It opens with the words that describe the homeland of its narrator: “That is no country for old men . . .” Rather, it is a land of youth and nature in its purest state, with “The young . . .

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. . .

But this land of unschooled nature is stunted, with a void where the life of the mind and of the imagination ought to flourish. For this reason, the speaker, an old man, cannot stay and has instead “sailed the seas and come / to the holy city of Byzantium.” To Yeats, Byzantium is the place where the human capacity for art comes nearest to perfection. As such, it must touch the divine, and in the city he prays to be admitted to the its mysteries:

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul . . . . 

Where is the line here between the “real” and the imagined? Byzantium was as real as any materialist could demand and so, too, was the art created there. We still have much of it. That art, which, for Yeats, defined the city’s greatness, could hardly have been made without acts of the imagination as the starting place. They came into being through the work of myriad craftsmen and artists, acting individually but at the same time through some very real communion that lasted across generations and centuries. At its zenith, Yeats believed that Byzantium embodied, to a remarkable degree, the cultural aspiration that always lay behind the city’s day-to-day life: “I think if I could have been given a month of antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened Sancta Sophia and closed the academy of Plato. I think I could find in some little wine shop some philosopher-worker in mosaic, who could answer all my questions, the supernatural descending nearer to him than to Plotinus even” (Cities of the Imagination, 68:00–68:30). Following Blake, we might well say that in the case of Byzantium, it was imagination that built the city and the arts that came to define it.

And eventually, working in and through the symbols associated with Byzantium, Yeats wrote his poem and in doing so made the city real, if imaginal, once again, renewing its symbolic force in the minds of his readers. For Yeats, Raine wrote, “Byzantium was not only the ancient city of Constantine but that environment of the arts in which we live and discover ourselves; ‘holy’ because what art mirrors is the eternal world” (That Wondrous Pattern, 113).

Of course, Raine’s take on the city and its meaning is elevated to the point where it seems utterly disconnected from our current politics. Given all our pressing problems today, it is perfectly fair to ask whether her sort of metaphysics are in any way relevant. Isn’t there too much on the line just now? In any case, the political culture of the United States has not been especially receptive to such speculation, at least not in recent decades. We have often told our selves that our practicality is our strength. And what real hope could such metaphysics provide for a society that is now so diverse that only the most practical, least speculative course of action would seem safe. What, other than basic practicality, could unite a country of 330 million people from every conceivable racial, religious, ethnic, and ideological background?

In reply, we might turn the tables and ask how our vaunted pragmatism is actually working these days. Consider, for example, the deteriorating state of public education. We might have expected education to improve with the founding of the federal Department of Education not so long ago, stuffed with experts, and spending substantial sums every year since. What do we have to show for this investment? Or consider whether all the sharp, practical minds behind our public health policies have served the country well, given the endless rise in health care costs. Has the expertise and massive spending purchased good health? Is it not possible that the root problem is a failure to understand people and society as they really are, because we limit ourselves to the material and seemingly pragmatic? Cut off from the “living form” that that gives coherence and life to society, things fall apart. As Kathleen Raine wrote,“Materialism makes a chaos of, precisely, the material world” (Autobiographies, 196) .

If she and her masters Blake and Yeats are right, the challenge to renew our politics is both immense and delicate. Immense because real political and cultural change—the two cannot be severed—will depend on a renewal of spiritual and imaginative capacities that seem all but alien to our public life at present, after decades of thinking and acting as if they were, in fact, unreal.

Delicate because any such turnaround would depend ultimately on our capacity to engage deep metaphysical realities and order, to perceive more clearly those things we miss as a society so completely. Not only is this a difficult mission, it will depend ultimately on actions that might not even be real actions, but something more passive and receptive instead, in the sense that Raine’s encounter with her hyacinth was.

Are we capable of that on a scale that will regenerate our political life? Perhaps not, at least for now, but we can take heart from the knowledge that, over the long course of human events, peoples have built cities that embodied high civic ends. Indeed, perhaps we never failed completely to do so. Our built-in aspirations still open toward such a future. And reality, Raine writes, “does not change its nature because we are unaware of it” (That Wondrous Pattern, 89).

Books:

Raine, Kathleen, That Wondrous Pattern (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2017)

Raine, Kathleen, Autobiographies (San Rafael: Coracle, 2009)

Image credit: John Singer Sargent, “From Jerusalem” (1905-1906) via Wikimedia Commons