Though born in the town of Ilford (Essex), Kathleen Raine spent critical years of her childhood in Bavington, Northumberland which shaped the way she viewed nature. The main influences in her life were Blake, Plato and Eastern philosophy. Her personal life was marred by tragic incidents for which she held herself responsible. She studied natural sciences at Cambridge after winning a scholarship to Girton College but she was put off by the atheism, secularism and the modernism that she encountered there. She believed in the universal spirit and like Blake, believed that “one power alone makes a poet – imagination, the divine power”