Poetry & Platonism: A Conversation with Kathleen Raine

by Gary Lachman
Gary Lachman is an American writer living in London. His work has appeared in The Guardian,
Gnosis, The Quest, ReVision, Common Boundary, LA Weekly, Abraxas, Journal for
Anthroposophy, San Francisco Chronicle, and Lapis. He is the author of two volumes in the
Paupers Press Colin Wilson Studies series. He has also been a composer and performer with the
rock groups Blondie, Iggy Pop, and The Know.
Lapis Magazine
http://www.lapismagazine.org/archives/L04/raine-lachman-int.html
Readers interested in finding out more about the Temenos Academy can write to:
Temenos Academy, 14 Gloucester Gate, London NW1 4HG, England.

The whole scientific materialist ideology, which permeates our culture and is spreading
everywhere, totally precludes the dimensions of reality that are concerned with meaning and
value. If you are only concerned with scientifically measurable and experimentally provable
information about the external world, you cut off all access to those areas of consciousness that
are concerned with values and meanings. -Kathleen Raine
For more than 50 years the poet and scholar Kathleen Raine has been a passionate and articulate
champion of the spiritual life in human beings. Her early studies at Cambridge were in science,
but she soon discovered her path lay in another direction. In works like Defending Ancient
Springs, The Inner Journey of the Poet, Blake and Tradition, The Human Face of God, Yeats the
Initiate, and many others, she uncovered the influence of Neoplatonic philosophy on 19th and
20th century English poetry and argued for a reawakening of its truth in our lives today. Her own
poetry, collected in Stone and Flower; The Lost Country; The Oval Portrait and Other Poems;
The Presence; Poems 1984-1989 and other volumes is characterized by a clarity and precision of
language and a mystical love of nature. Her Autobiographies show her as a creative and sensitive
mind in the midst of the intellectual and artistic revolutions of the 20th century, and a friend of
some of its celebrated figures: Herbert Read, Edwin Muir, Elias Canetti, and Jacob Bronowski,
to name a few. For many years now she has been dedicated to communicating the wisdom of our
forgotten tradition through the work of the Temenos Academy, a modern-day school of
wisdom teaching the learning of the imagination and the perennial philosophy, set in the
midst of urban London. The list of names associated with Temenos reads like a whos-who of
alternative thought: Henry Corbin, Robert Bly, William Irwin Thompson, Joscelyn Godwinagain, to name a few. Sitting down to tea with her is like spending an afternoon with the history
of ideas.
On a pleasant June afternoon this past summer I had an opportunity to meet and speak with
Kathleen Raine at her home in Chelsea. We talked of her life, poetry, her work, India, feminism,
the family, and the general state of things. At eighty-nine, Kathleen Raine has seen and done
quite a bit. Lively, provocative, and challenging, she has no qualms about telling us what she
thinks.

GL: In Defending Ancient Springs you write: Like an underground river that from time to time
sends up springs and fountains, Platonism emerges in different centuries in different countries,
and wherever its fertilizing waters flow, then the arts are reborn and flourish. How did you
discover the Neo- platonic tradition in Romantic poetry?
KR: I read the books that Blake was known to have read, and one thing lead to another. I had to
revise my entire view of Blake as a man who didnt know very much and had gotten his ideas all
out of his unconscious. He had contact, as I discovered, with Thomas Taylor, the Platonist. He
read an enormous amount of excluded knowledge that modernism has for the most part
eliminated for us. A whole context of esoteric studies. The Rosicrucian tradition for one thing
and this enormously rich fund of Neoplatonic writings being translated into English at that time
by Thomas Taylor. As I said, here I found an absolute gold mine of Blakes sources.
Blake was in the context of the perennial wisdom at the time when the modern West was
turning away from these things. And he actually knew Thomas Taylor. I found in my work that it
was virtually certain that he would have known him, and sure enough some years later evidence
was found in Canada that he had known Taylor.
Blake probably would have gone to Taylors lectures on Platonic theology at Flaxmans,
Blakes friends house. He read virtually all Taylors works and clearly got a great deal from
them. That was the basis of my original work on Blake. I had to give up the idea that it all came
up from the unconscious. He read Plato, the Hermetica. He was in a different tradition from his
time, and this tradition was the mainstream. And from time to time this mainstream surfaces and
then goes underground again. Shelley also had this contact. He read the Greeks in the original.
Coleridge as a boy read Thomas Taylor. So the Romantic movement was really a Neoplatonic
revival. And then of course it went underground again and came up as American
Transcendentalism. All Taylors works were taken to America by Emerson. It was a very
powerful thing in America. The new situation, which isnt an exclusively Christian tradition but a
universal tradition, uniting all spiritual currents, really came first in America. Emerson was
tremendously widely read in Persian and Sanskrit literature.
GL: It was the New World.
KR: The New World. I think its still true. There are some very good people in the States. Ive
done what I can in this godforsaken country. Its hard work.
GL: Its difficult here? Why?
KR: England is impervious to ideas. It always has been. Yeats said England had the poorest
philosophical literature in the world.
GL: Why do you think that is?
KR: What shall I say? England has produced some amazingly good poets. Even in my lifetime it
has produced good poets, although Eliot was an American and Yeats an Irishman, and Edwin
Muir was a Scot if you like... But nevertheless the poetic tradition in this country has been much
more influenced by Platonism... I suppose the religion of the English poets is basically Platonic.

Whereas philosophy has been very much linked to materialist science. Locke and Hume and later
Russell and all that. Wittgenstein I think is rather different, not so impervious as the others. He
was Rilkes patron you know.
GL: You might call yourself a defender of tradition-ancient springs. But youve had some
critical words about other traditionalists, like Ren Guenon.
KR: I think Guenon had no imagination whatsoever, as far as I can see. He seemed to think that
there was a Golden Age when everything was right, and then, somewhere around the time of the
Renaissance man, took a wrong step, and God has withdrawn from the world ever since. I dont
think thats true at all. He was against Renaissance Platonism, which is a very wonderful and
powerful thing. It produced Shakespeare, after all. His followers also say that you must choose
your tradition and stick to it. Either be a Muslim or a Christian or something else, but dont mix
one with the other. I dont think thats true. In the present state of the world, whatever you are,
youre aware of the other traditions. Unless youre a fundamentalist you cant avoid eclecticism.
Were all open to all the currents. We cant pretend were not. And so I dont think a withdrawal
into fundamentalism of any kind is realistic.
Guenon was very timely, you see. I think at the time he was saying things nobody else would
say. Everyone believed we were going onward and upward with evolution, and everything was
getting better. Nobody believes that now. Guenon said that on the contrary things are going from
bad to worse. That needed to be said then. But not now. Hes also extremely contemptuous of his
readers, adopting an attitude of intellectual superiority. Thats not what true sages are like. Thats
not what Ramakrishna was like. Or Ramana Marharshi or Vivekananda. Thats not what holy
men are like. Theyre open and full of love.
Part of my criticism of the traditionalist school is their devaluing of the imagination. You
cant write poetry from that position. Poetry is an upwelling from within. If it werent for the
presence of the universal teacher within each human being it wouldnt be any use having a
tradition. Tradition is the history and the record of the human experience of the sacred. Without
that experience youd have no tradition, it would have no validity. But it can serve to awaken the
awareness of these truths. If you read Plotinus, Rumi, Plato, the Gita, something responds to it.
Yeats was very learned in the perennial philosophy. Extremely learned. Much more so than
Eliot. He read everything, Arabic, Hindu, and finally committed to Vedanta. His last work was
translating the Upanishads. Eliot had certain contact although not so much.
GL: He seemed to have withdrawn.
KR: He did, deliberately. He thought hed be best understood within the English language and
the Christian tradition. There are some references to the Gita in The Waste Land and in The
Quartets, but it doesnt go very deep. I see a watershed between Eliot and Yeats. Eliot stayed
with the past and committed himself to western Christendom. Yeats foresaw that in the future
Eliot would be less well understood (because he committed himself to Christianity) than Yeats
himself would be by having opened himself to all sacred traditions. I think thats true.
GL: In your book on India, India Seen Afar, you talk about the India of the imagination. Why
India?

KR: When I reached India I felt home at last. No question. Its still alive in India, although
westernization goes on apace, and there are yuppies, and every village in Rajastan has television
sets. India has become totally permeable to Western ways. Technology has made every primitive
civilization, every civilization, totally permeable to this propaganda, which comes basically, Im
sorry to say, from America. I feel that the gods of Disneyland are very, very evil.
GL: It seems technology can promote the values of Disneyland but not sacred values.
KR: It cant promote any values. It can give information.
GL: What do you think about the information age?
KR: Maybe the unification of the whole world, to which information technology has certainly
contributed, could produce what Teilhard de Chardin called the Nosphere, the whole world
thinking as one. But unfortunately it seems to be on the lowest level. And yet, I dont despair.
The truth is that we are not trousered apes. We are part of the divine. And the god within
recognizes meanings and values that occupied the human race long before this materialist
civilization.
GL: Which is fairly recent, only the last 300 or so years.
KR: Indeed, thats what Yeats says. He also said that three provincial centuries over, wisdom
and poetry return. Well, perhaps they will. Tides do turn. I think a great many people arent
satisfied with the information age, the age where money is the only value. And what can you buy
with money? Platinum-plated motorcars? What do you do with it once youve got it?
GL: Do you think people want something else?
KR: Yes. But they dont know where to get it. In this country I must say the one level on which
you can appeal to many young people is the green way of life. My granddaughter and her
husband and two children have gone off to Ireland and gotten a derelict farm. Theyre doing all
the things the Irish people themselves are just discarding, like cutting their own turf. They have
chickens and goats and vegetables, and theyre getting a beehive. Theyre doing a roaring
business in barter and exchange of mushrooms and eggs and beans and cabbages for coffee and
tea and such things. A lot of young people are going into that. They wont think, but theyll live
the green life. I imagine thats so in the States. But I think in America you are more prepared to
use your minds.
GL: You think?
KR: I think in America youre prepared to take up any crazy ideas.
GL: But theres a shadow side to that, a faddish eclecticism about religion- how you can be
Buddhist this week and a Hindu the next.

KR: Yes, and youre prepared to do anything for six months, except of course any check on your
sex life. Yes, its all very crazy and mixed up, and Ive seen some of that. Nevertheless, I do
believe that the seeds of the ancient civilizations fall to some extent on virgin soil in America.
When I think of my next life-provided of course one does have a next life-my first thought is,
Of course Ill get back to India. But then I think I wonder what it would be like in America?
GL: Youd like to be reincarnated in America?
KR: Well, Ive been very happy there.
GL: Would you be a poet again in your next life?
KR: Oh no! No.
GL: Why? Because youve done it already?
KR: Ive done it already. I dont have much faith in poetry.
GL: You dont have much faith in poetry?
KR: At one time poetry implied that the poet was contributing a special kind of wisdom, passing
a judgment of the values of eternity on the values of time. But now poetry seems to be just
writing down whatever comes into your head. Any idea of poetic tradition and poetic technique
has totally been thrown out.
GL: When do you think the change happened?
KR: With the modern movement, which is basically a materialist movement. The idea that there
is a spiritual order on which poetry is supposed to draw is completely gone from our civilization.
Its just not there anymore.
GL: People like Ezra Pound?
KR: No, Pound wasnt totally without these things. After all, he was a friend of Yeats. People
talk about the influence of Pound on Yeats; I think Yeats also had a considerable influence on
Pound. He dedicated A Vision to him. So he must have thought hed understand. Pound brought
the Noh theater of Japan to Yeats. I met him once. He was a most generous man, a really
wonderful man. Not as good a poet as either Eliot or Yeats I think, but a great, great contribution
to poetry. He really knew a great deal about world poetry, and his translations of Persian and
Chinese are wonderful. No, Im not anti-Pound.
GL: No. But you say the modern movement, and Im trying to place that. Do you mean the poets
of the thirties, the socially conscious poets, Auden...?
KR: Well, its the gradual loss you see. Eliots poetry is a lament for the loss of tradition. But
people went on cheerfully after that and said Oh well, we dont need tradition. We reject the

follies of our parents. Well write free verse and dont need to know anything. So we get poetry
as self-expression, as therapy, social or political poetry. Or moaning about the universe. I dont
know why we should moan about the universe. I think its wonderful.
GL: What advice would you give a poet today?
KR: Id say forget it, and do philosophy instead. Or learn history. Start to learn things. Temenos,
after all, is trying to reestablish true knowledge. You see, you cant write poetry when theres no
one wholl read it intelligently. There has to be an ambiance in which you can communicate.
Otherwise youre talking to yourself.
GL: Do you see Temenos as a university of some sort?
KR: Id like to think that might be so in the future. But its been hard work. Inch by inch weve
managed to raise it from the ground. Right now were seeking accreditation for an MA course for
our students, which I dare say well get. We have a few students going out into the world. After
all, Christianity began with half a dozen people. There werent awfully many people listening to
Socrates. Things have to start in a small way. Were doing it slowly and gradually. We have one
really warm and enthusiastic supporter, the Prince of Wales, who is really a philosopher-prince.
All this rubbish about his marriage that preoccupies the press continuously and this silly woman
he married! God shes such a bore! He never gets a word of thanks for what hes doing, but hes
tremendously behind Temenos. We hold our meetings in his Institute of Architecture.
GL: You say you think our civilization is in its last stages. Is it a cycle? Where will the next
flowering be?
KR: There may not be a next flowering. Weve done enough damage to the planet to bring about
our destruction. Look, if you have a civilization whose most powerful and advanced countries
make the most profit by exporting weapons, what can you expect? What is the most profitable
export of England, France, the United States? Arms. Weapons of destruction. Selling land mines
to mutilate children in Afghanistan and other countries. Well send arms to anyone wholl buy
them, and then we say these dreadful Yugoslavs or these awful Iraqis-and sell them more arms.
No civilization can survive whose principles are as low as that. The only thing we care about is
money and markets.
Media people know where the money lies, and put in their papers and their broadcasts what
they think will bring in the most money. How much lower can you go? They greatly
underestimate the common man. The bottom line isnt as low as the press makes it. But you can
always lower it, and what theyre appealing to is the lowest and worst in human nature. And the
only way it can be changed is by changing the climate of the world.
GL: Since the 1960s, and even earlier than that, theres been a lot said about the Age of Aquarius,
which, of course, goes back to Platos idea of the Great Year and the precession of the equinoxes.
With the millennium closing in, theres a great deal of talk about a spiritual resurgence. Do you
see any signs of this?

KR: Well, theres got to be one. I spent some time with the Hopi people. It was only a short time
but it was unforgettable. Absolutely wonderful people. We were entertained by a village chieftain
named Henry. He told us a lot about the Hopi prophecies. He said there are seven ages of the
world. This is the fourth, the lowest. You see it comes down in the cycles. After that things get a
little bit better. The fifth age will be a little better than the 4th. He said that here and there all over
the world there are little shoots of the fifth age springing up, which I think is what were talking
about. He couldnt know about the Theosophical view of the evolution of the world through
seven ages. Its a universal view. One can only say that perhaps it corresponds to reality.
GL: I know this is off the subject but I have to say Im very impressed that youve never tasted
Coca-Cola.
KR: I never touch the stuff.
GL: Thats a distinction few people can claim.
KR: I dont have a television set either. Why should I let people into my living room that I
wouldnt let through my front door?
GL: What would you say your life has been about?
KR: Whats my life been about? I suppose Ive been on the human pilgrimage to discover what
were here for and what we should do. Ive made many mistakes, but I have at least learned by
them. Whats the use of making mistakes if you dont learn by them? Theyre extremely useful
from that point of view. Ive made all of them, thats how I know. And now Im trying to teach
the things Ive found to be good and true, within my capacity. I think Temenos is going to go
down in history, even it doesnt blow up quickly into a university. That is what I would like. Id
like to see a university of wisdom in which truth was taught instead of all these isms and ologies.
I think the universities have betrayed their task. Theyve betrayed their true task which is to teach
human beings the good things by which we need to live. These dont alter very much over the
centuries or between the different religious traditions. They remain fairly constant, because
things are as they are and we are as we are. You can only deviate so much from those truths
without destruction. We have to get back to them. Or rediscover them. Discover who we are. The
materialist definition of man is totally inadequate.
We have a lot to learn from the east. In the west, we study the external world, and get more
information. In the east you change your self. You change your consciousness and then you see
the world differently. If you realize that mind is the root of knowledge, then you work on
consciousness. You work on mind. You work on yourself. Change yourself and then the world
changes. With scientific materialist knowledge you can take a rocket to the moon and explore
outer space, but wherever you go you bring your poor little self.
GL: Any advice for young people today?
KR: I think its very painful to be young. Its terrible. I wouldnt be young again for anything. I
think its much easier now. Each decade Ive found is less difficult then the one before. Im in
my ninth now and I can tell you it gets easier. Advice? Grow up.