Informing Beauty

Once in a while you read a book that sets off an electric charge inside you. Usually it coheres with your unconscious ideas and is quite distinct from the feeling of reading a thriller whose pages you devour with unfocused gusto. This you ingest in measured spoonfuls, allowing its content to echo in your palate. Fittingly perhaps, I spent much of that first encounter with Kathleen Raine’s Defending Ancient Springs staying in an unelectrified apartment in Lisbon’s Bairro Alfama.

Prior to reading Raine I had been cultivating a friendship with W.B. Yeats, drawing solace from his struggles with spurned affection and aging. I was driven to sing the words of this supremely lyrical poet. But I encountered his symbolism with some wariness considering the capacity for delusional evil contained in occult ideas.

I realise now that my Yeats period had groomed me to receive the clarity of Raine’s aesthetic principles. I did not agree with all she wrote but the book – lent to me by a friend with strict instructions that it should be returned ‘as it is very hard to find’ – has a timeless quality that makes it a selfishlyguarded treasure.

At the heart of a narrative that contains essays on her preferred Romantic poets and themes such as beauty, myth and symbol is the conviction that ‘a revival of the learning of the works of Plato and the neo-Platonists, has been the inspiration not only of the Florentine renaissance and all that followed (in England as elsewhere) but of every subsequent renaissance’. The suggestion that this is an essential source for great poetry may sound farfetched but the neo-Platonist influence on the pantheon of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake and Yeats is well attested to.

Neo-Platonists believe in an essential order to the universe that our true