Jessica Stephens – författare

Resistance is a key concept for understanding the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and for approaching the poetry of the period. This collection of 15 critical essays explores how poetry and resistance interact, set against a philosophical, historical and cultural background. In the light of the upheavals of the age, and the changing perception of the nature of language, resistance is seen to lie at the core of poetic preoccupations, moving poetic language forward. From this perspective, the resistance of poetry is connected with the human call to solidarity, resilience, and, ultimately, meaning. The volume covers poetry from Hardy, Yeats and Auden, among others, to contemporary writers like Hugo Williams and Linton Kwesi Johnson.

This book offers the chance to (re)discover the remarkable work of Kathleen Raine, a twentieth-century British poet (1908–2003). Raine is the author of a major poetic oeuvre centred on her love of nature and her knowledge of Neoplatonism. She is also the author of an inspiring autobiography as well as a renowned scholar who wrote numerous essays on the English Romantics, William Blake, and Irish Nobel Prize winner W. B. Yeats.This collection contains twelve chapters written by scholars from the US and Europe, who focus on different aspects of Raine’s work: the importance of nature and the sacred, her philosophical commitment to a spiritual vision of man, her efforts to disseminate a form of perennial wisdom (the Sophia Perennis) through the Temenos Academy, and her concern with passing this wisdom on to young people.Raine’s powerful voice, which arose in a century that she deemed plunged in deadly materialism, will resonate today with new generations yearning for a meaningful world.