Golgonooza, City of Imagination

Golgonooza, City of Imagination: Last Studies in William Blake

Considered one of the seminal poets and artists of the Romantic Age, William Blake and his idiosyncratic mix of philosophy and art have long baffled and delighted readers from all walks of life. When encountering such a unique body of work for the first time, the reader would be wise to mimic Dante in calling upon a guide, and few, if any, could be more qualified for such a task than Kathleen Raine. Golgonooza, City of Imagination includes seven studies representing the culmination of Raine’s forty years of research into the meaning and character of Blake’s symbolic themes. Widely recognized as one of Blake’s most profound interpreters, and an accomplished poet in her own right, Raine reaches into the very heart of Blake’s thought and serves as no less than an insider’s guide to the extraordinary height, depth, and breadth of his imaginative vision.

About the Author

Kathleen Raine (1908–2003) graduated from Cambridge University in 1929. She became one of English literature’s most remarkable twentieth-century practitioners. Although she considered herself primarily a poet, she was also a prolific writer of prose, an astute critic, and a distinguished scholar. Her poems and essays assert that true poetry is an expression of the spirit, the unfolding of a reality often hidden by the material appearance of things. Raine wrote a three-part autobiography (1973-1977), founded the magazine Temenos in 1981 to articulate her views, and in 1990 established the Temenos Academy of Integral Studies, a teaching academy that stressed a multistranded universalist philosophy. A professor at Cambridge and the author of a number of scholarly books, she was an expert on Coleridge, Blake, and Yeats.