This talk explores how Neoplatonism shaped both the intellectual commitments and literary style of Kathleen Raine. Raine understood consciousness as the ground of reality and regarded ancient symbolic discourse—drawn from Platonic and Neoplatonic texts, the Corpus Hermeticum, and other esoteric traditions—as a living inheritance capable of expanding human perception. Her poetry, criticism and autobiographies reveal a mode of writing in which inner and outer worlds interpenetrate, and where literature becomes a vehicle for transforming consciousness. This talk focuses on her autobiographical practice, which adapts ancient allegoresis, including Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs, to interpret her life as a multilayered symbolic text. This approach not only informs Raine’s stylistic choices—rich in myth, metaphor and visionary resonance—but also aims to initiate readers into a way of seeing, grounded in the perennial philosophy she sought to recover. In doing so, Raine offers literary style as a path of philosophical insight.

Dr. Jenny Messenger is a UK-based journalist and writer who covers climate change, the environment, housing and business. She is currently working on a short book about the cultural history of the sponge. Her first monograph, Kathleen Raine: Classics and Consciousness, was published by Bloomsbury in July and develops research from her 2019 PhD at the University of St Andrews, Neoplatonism and its Reception in Robert Graves, Jorge Luis Borges, Suzanne Lilar, and Kathleen Raine. The book examines how Graeco-Roman antiquity informs Raine’s conceptions of consciousness and illuminates her distinctive poetic and scholarly vision.

In the Chair: Professor Grevel Lindop

Venue & Admission

The Warburg Institute, London WC1H 0AB

Doors open at 6.10 pm, lecture begins at 6.30 pm.

£10 General Admission

FREE for Temenos Academy Members/Full-time students with ID card