Customer Reviews

The Inner Journey of the Poet, and Other Papers

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I became aware of Kathleen Raine through an interest in the poet William Blake and the Neoplatonist Plotinus. The eleven addresses in "The Inner Journey of the Poet" had me thinking some things I hadn't before.

Raine has much to say about the reality of imagination vs. the reality of materialism. She herself admits that her views are not particularly original. Her arguments got me thinking that imagination is its own kind of reality, a particularly (if not uniquely) human reality. The ultimate reality of the creative imagination is alive in the minds of those who believe it. If it doesn't really exist, it probably can't be disproved, since the dead are likely in no position to know and report. So, meanwhile, while we're alive, our crediting imagination as the highest form of reality is what prevents us being just cogs in the materialist mechanistic universe.

Raine discusses Blake's faith in Imagination as key to his philosophy. She quotes snatches of his prophetic books that make sense in the context of her explanations. For instance, she interprets Los as Time and Enitharmon as Space, and then quotes some passages that support that interpretation. This makes Los seems somewhat less daunting than the pages and pages of definition in Damon's "A Blake Dictionary." So, I sense that a beginning reader of Blake's prophetic poems may benefit from first reading Raine, and then may profit from reading Damon, Erdman, Bloom, Frye and others.

Raine also points to sources of Blake's thought in Thomas Taylor's translations of Plotinus, and of Divine Love and Wisdom by Swedenborg. She also mentions how much of his thought is supported by the later writings of Henry Corbin. All three of these -- Taylor, Swedenborg, Corbin -- may be interesting for philosophical Christians to read. I personally found their writing more tedious than I like to slog through, so I'm glad to have had Raine's summation of their ideas that are relevant to Blake's writings.

This book does not cover the "how" of writing poetry, nor even the "why" of writing it, so much as the "what" of writing it. I was struck by her advice to look inward to find what's most common with other people, instead of looking outward for commonality. To look outward is to look at the material which changes over time. To look inward is find what is always fresh with each generation. She makes a distinction, though, between the surrealists who looked inward for their individual quirkiness, as opposed to those who look inward for the Jungian archetypes and collective unconscious.

She depicts T.S. Eliot as focusing on the fragmentation of cultural tradition as opposed to the imaginative tradition which is renewed with Dante, Milton, Blake, Hopkins, Yeats, etc. She says she's not attempting a criticism of Eliot's poetry, but a description of the impact it made on her. She has things to say about him, Auden, David Jones, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Dante, Milton, Blake, Hopkins, Yeats, and some others. If you have an interest in the spiritual source for the thought of these poets, you will probably find this a rewarding book.