Philip Sherrard reviews Kathleen Raine’s book Defending Ancient Spring. “The book is a collection of essays either on poets or on topics directly related to poetry—on myth and symbol, and the use of the beautiful.” Raine’s book is written in defense of the traditional springs and the poets who have found them. “From this point of view, all art—all true art—is always concerned with the expression of themes connected with the nature of the soul and what is beyond the soul…” Raines discusses both historical examples while also touching on the dilemma of modern poets who seek to speak on traditional themes in a non-traditional world.

American vitality and openness to “the other” comes in for praise in this review of Nancy Wilson Ross’s illustrated book on eastern traditions whose approach the reviewer, Kathleen Raine, finds refreshing. Condemning her own country’s erstwhile narrowness and impenetrability to the spirituality of India, as well as those purists who scorn American Zen for missing its doctrinal truth, she suggests that Zen’s natural, non-mythological and historical quality may be a door through which America, as a microcosm of the modern world, can approach a more subtle and potentially spiritual view of nature.

Kathleen Raine reviews the reprint of this book and the impact its translator, Thomas Taylor the Platonist (1758-1837), exerted on 19th century thought. It was Taylor, first translator of Plato into English, who supplied the texts “from which the English Romantic poets learned the Neo-Platonism metaphysics which wrought so revolutionary a transforma¬tion in the theory and practice of poetry at the end of the eighteenth century.” Both the American Transcendentalists and the Neo-Platonists for the Theosophical Society drew their inspiration from these same works. Taylor is now only known to Academia, but “he was more than a scholar, he was a philosopher in the Platonic sense of the word."

In this article Kathleen Raine analyses the poem about Kubla Khan, delving into how it compares with the art and philosophy of other works and thinkers. She begins with a history of the poem, and how the idea became re-introduced later on in American thought. Later she begins to compare the ideas represented in this poem with those of other thinkers such as Freud, Plato, and Emerson. The poem of Kubla Khan becomes a focal point within this article for an analysis of the ideas of paradise and human emotions. Raine skillfully inserts passages from the work and thus makes it easier to understand the specific concepts discussed about this article.