Kathleen Raine

Died: July 6, 2003, aged 95.

THE unacknowledged reigning queen of British poetry died last week as a delayed result of a tragic accident. She had been posting a letter, was knocked off balance by a reversing car, fell and broke her hip. The hip mended, but pneumonia took its toll. She was 95 and still active. We all thought she would live forever.

To many on the poetry circuit now, she may not even be a name. She worked in her own mysterious ways, taking no part in "the literary scene", and had no time for courting fame. But she was undoubtedly the most remarkable female poetic presence of the 20th century.

Raine was born in London, daughter of a school teacher and Methodist lay preacher. The family moved to Northumberland, providing her with a natural environment that underpinned everything she did.

Her mother was Scottish, of a Borders family, her language Scots, poetry from both north and south of the Border dripping from her tongue, culture and spirit drawn from Scotland. Her daughter drank down every word, every song.

Raine’s spirit was Scottish, as she avowed, hence Tom Scott’s inclusion of her in The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse. Long before we were properly aware of them, she was fully appreciative of the work of Sorley MacLean, George Campbell Hay, and many others. She was thrilled to be a guest of honour at the launch of the Scottish Poetry Library in 1983.

An elitist to her core, she chose to learn her craft from other poets, not academics - hence her choice to study botany, zoology and physiology at Girton College, Cambridge, rather than English literature. "There are people who grow better lettuces than others," she told me in a wide-ranging interview (Agenda Vol 31 No 4) ten years ago.

Raine’s primary devotion was to the world of the spirit, to the imagination. To her, all was universal, a curious symbiology between her and Hugh MacDairmid - different ways of expressing the same insight about the oneness and the miraculousness of existence, a truly metaphysical vision. There was no room for ego, hence her contempt for many contemporary poets. What mattered was the unselfish attempt to tap into "the truth", the "things that make your hair stand on end".

For her, poetry was endless duty, endless giving, without question, and the idea that the state owed poets a living was anathema to her.

"My imagination, you see. That’s it absolutely. It isn’t my imagination. It is THE imagination, which is universal. And with too many poets: ‘It’s my poem - I’m writing this poem.’ It’s me, it’s the transient, temporary ego. Who am I, that’s the question. The I AM is the universal imagination in all of us. It’s the universal mind, not ME, ME, ME."

Raine has produced an incredible body of poetry over her long life, spent years becoming a Blake scholar, reading as widely as one could imagine, knowing everybody in the literary world she had time for (and many for whom she didn’t). She lived always by her own lights. Haughty, imperious, almost royal in her bearing, she was formidable.

Family life is always difficult for such women. She married the socialite Hugh Sykes Davis briefly, divorcing him to marry Charles Madge, a founder of the Mass Observation Archive, by whom she had a son and a daughter, but that marriage too foundered. Then followed a most unfortunate episode - about which she wrote with painful honesty in her three-volume autobiography - with Gavin Maxwell. She was in love with him, relishing the times spent at Sandaig, Argyll with his otters. Her love could not be requited because of Maxwell’s sexuality.

The outcome was tragic. Driven mad by frustration and pain, left alone in charge of otters and croft, she reacted, quite beside herself:, invoking the spirit of the sacred rowan tree. "Weeping, I laid my hands upon the trunk, calling upon the tree for justice: "Let Gavin suffer, in this place, as I am suffering now." The otters died, the house burned down. Maxwell blamed her forever for that "curse". In her last couple of decades, she knew she’d hurt people, but moved into a forgiveness of herself, and into a deeper love of humanity through her life of the spirit and the imagination.

She "found herself" in her 70s and 80s. As she recovered from Maxwell, putting herself through the Blake apprenticeship healed her soul, and she found herself embraced in a kind of love beyond her own understanding. From the mid-70s on, I was in regular touch with her, and will never forget receiving a letter in her almost illegible script which said proudly, almost childishly: "I’m an editor too now!"

She started the remarkable magazine Temenos, subtitled "A Review Devoted to the Arts of the Imagination", in 1980. She was 72 at the time. Sponsors include the Prince’s Trust and many other prestigious bodies.

Each issue runs to at least 260 pages. Over the years she produced 13 issues before deciding she’d had enough. At the time of the Agenda interview she was 85, and the magazine did not have enough money to pay the printer’s bill. She was proposing to sell a painting to raise the money and mentioned this over tea to Valerie Eliot (wife of TS), who responded by bringing out her chequebook, declaring "Cats will pay!" - and wrote a cheque for 8,000.

Next to Scotland, she loved India. Both cultures, she thought, were still in touch with their primeval roots, their language and culture relatively undistorted by commerce, politics and fashion. She genuinely believed that both English literature and language had lost the plot. Despite her strong bond with Prince Charles, she said of the Queen ("poor lady") and the upper classes, "they don’t speak it any more now".

Her attitude to women poets would infuriate most women poets and we fought over it furiously. Women, and women poets, were "handmaidens of the muse" - ie the bearers of drink and inspiration to the ones who could really do it - the men. She was quite happy to relegate her own poetry to the upper echelons of mediocrity. I tried to argue that this was indoctrination, social assumptions, that all would change as the genders equalised, but all my arguments were batted away like midges on a humid evening. The great poets were and always will be men, and that was that.

Her view of the role of women was the husbandry of the environment and the creation of the home, as providers of the understanding of the social fabric of life - so women novelists were OK. But above all, women were the sustenance of the message necessary to the survival of the human race - that we should love one another. Easy to say, but it carries more authority from one who came through the pain of, for example, the Maxwell affair. Her renewed relationship in later years with her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren rather underlines that point. Life is not easy for literary women, especially of that generation. From start to finish, she was herself, moved from one painful point to another, learning to the end.

Known and renowned internationally, she must now be rediscovered in Britain, in Scotland, for the incredible force she was. She had nothing but contempt for "the predictors", believing that, lacking real vision, nothing they say can ever be right. In these hyped-up times, what she stood for may seem quite crazy. She was elitist in the sense that she stood for effort, for quality, for truth. The right to space to achieve a genuine "hereness", she passionately wanted everyone to have. But they don’t have to write poetry and expect it to be taken seriously, as literature.

Just as, almost certainly, we have not absorbed Blake, so we have not absorbed Kathleen Raine. Her whole life was not about developing her reputation, but about being a water-bearer, carrying the human spirit forward to the benefit of all. "The task of poetry is to create, reveal beauty, not to destroy it." Authoritarian, remote, aristocratic, patrician, unapproachable she may have seemed to some; but it was in aid of an ultimate generosity, a givingness she felt her life-long duty - to enrich the spiritual lives of as many people as she could reach. Her only claim to uniqueness was as "a watcher" and these four lines from an untitled short poem sum up her existence:

Ah, many, many are the dead

Who hold this pen and with my fingers write:

What am I but their memory

Whose afterlife I live, who haunt

My waking and my sleep with the untold?

JOY HENDRY