Craig Raine

Craig Anthony Raine, FRSL (born 3 December 1944) is an English contemporary poet. Along with Christopher Reid, he is a pioneer of Martian poetry, a movement that expresses alienation with the world, society and objects. He was a fellow of New College, Oxford, from 1991 to 2010 and is now emeritus professor. He was the editor of Areté from 1999 to 2020.

Early life Raine was born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, the son of Norman Edward and Olive Marie Raine. His father was the North of England amateur boxing champion in 1937. He then worked as a bomb armourer for the RAF, until forced to retire due to epilepsy caused by a skull fracture. He won a scholarship to Barnard Castle School, where he lived as a boarder. At school he wrote "'pimply Dylan Thomas' poems, some of which he sent to Philip Toynbee, then lead reviewer at The Observer".

Career Raine taught at Oxford and followed a literary career as book editor for New Review, editor of Quarto, and poetry editor at the New Statesman. He became poetry editor at publishers Faber and Faber in 1981, and has been a fellow of New College, Oxford, since 1991, retiring from his post as tutor in June 2010. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984.

In 1972 he married Ann Pasternak Slater, a now retired fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. The Onion, Memory (1978), A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), A Free Translation (1981), Rich (1984), History: The Home Movie (1994), and Clay. Whereabouts Unknown (1996). His reviews and essays are collected in two anthologies: Haydn and the Valve Trumpet (1990) and In Defence of T. S. Eliot (2000). A short critical-biographical study of Eliot, T. S. Eliot: Image, Text and Context, was published in 2007.

His friend Ian McEwan argues that Raine espouses "very strong and clear, almost Arnoldian, ideas of literature and criticism".

Books

Poetry collections The Onion, Memory, Oxford University Press, 1978. . A Journey to Greece, Sycamore Press, 1979 A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, Oxford University Press, 1979. . A Free Translation, Salamander, 1981 Rich, Faber and Faber, 1984 The Prophetic Book (bilingual edition with Polish translation by Jerzy Jarniewicz), Correspondance des Arts, 1989 History: The Home Movie, Penguin, 1994 Change, Prospero Poets, 1995 Clay: Whereabouts Unknown, Penguin, 1996 Collected Poems 1978–1999, Picador, 1999 A la recherche du temps perdu, Picador, 2000 How Snow Falls, 2010

Fiction Heartbreak, Atlantic, 2010 The Divine Comedy, Atlantic, 2012

Drama 1953: A Version of Racine's Andromaque, Faber and Faber, 1990

Libretto The Electrification of the Soviet Union, Faber and Faber, 1986, opera by Nigel Osborne

Criticism Haydn and the Valve Trumpet, Faber and Faber, 1990 In Defence of T. S. Eliot, Picador, 2000 T. S. Eliot: Image, Text and Context, Oxford University Press, 2007 More Dynamite: Essays 1990–2012, Atlantic, 2013 My Grandmother's Glass Eye: A Look at Poetry, Atlantic, 2016

As editor A Choice of Kipling's Prose, Faber and Faber, 1987 Rudyard Kipling: Selected Poems, Penguin, 1992 New Writing 7, (co-editor) Vintage, 1998