Craig Raine Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Craig Raine was born on 3 December 1944 in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, England. He grew up in the postwar North East, a place and time that sensitized him to ordinary objects and working lives, textures that would later be transformed by his highly figurative style. He read English at Exeter College, Oxford, where sustained exposure to the metaphysical poets, modernists, and close critical argument formed a foundation for his later practice as both poet and critic. The Oxford milieu also introduced him to a network of writers and scholars who would remain part of his professional life, and it established the habits of attentive reading and debate that became hallmarks of his essays and reviews.

Emergence and the Martian Imagination
Raine came to public attention in the late 1970s with poems that reimagined the familiar through startling metaphors and telescoped description. The Onion, Memory (1978) announced his sensibility, but it was A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979) that fixed his reputation. The title poem, speaking as if Earth were newly observed by an alien, made the everyday strange and defamiliarized habit into discovery. Critics began to attach the label Martian poetry to Raine and to contemporaries such as Christopher Reid, identifying a technique that estranged the commonplace in order to refresh perception. The poems were at once comic and exacting, playful yet disciplined, and they swiftly entered anthologies and classrooms. Raine was not the leader of a programmatic movement, but his work exemplified a bold method that shaped British poetry in the period.

Editorial Work and Professional Circles
Raine spent much of the 1980s and 1990s as a poetry editor at Faber and Faber, a role that placed him at the center of British literary life. Faber was the longstanding home of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, and the house also published poets and critics such as Andrew Motion. Raine's editorial work demanded candor, self-criticism, and advocacy; it also meant constant engagement with manuscript culture and with the pressures on serious poetry in a commercial marketplace. His presence at Faber connected him to a wider circle of contemporaries who were reshaping postwar British prose and poetry, including figures like Ian Hamilton, James Fenton, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Julian Barnes, whose paths crossed with Raine's in magazines, at readings, and in reviews. He wrote frequently for journals and newspapers, developing a prose voice that was combative when needed and always grounded in close reading.

Books, Forms, and Collaborations
After A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, Raine continued to publish collections and sequences, notably Rich (1984), which broadened his tonal range and deepened his fascination with memory, appetite, and cultural recollection. His most ambitious long work, History: The Home Movie (1994), blends documentary impulse with lyric imagination, moving between episodes from his own English family and episodes drawn from his wife's Russian relatives. It is a collage-like narrative in verse and prose vignettes, a book that tests the boundaries between poetry, memoir, and historical montage. The familial material reaches outward toward European history and backward into the literary legacy that runs through Russia via Boris Pasternak, whose presence is felt in the Russian strands of the book.

Raine also worked in the theater and in music. He wrote the libretto for The Electrification of the Soviet Union for the composer Nigel Osborne, a work inspired by Pasternak's stories. This collaboration carried Raine's interest in Russian literature into a different medium and showed his willingness to adapt literary sources across forms. Later collections and selected volumes consolidated his reputation for a sensuous, image-rich style and for a critical imagination that treated poems as arguments in metaphor.

Criticism and Teaching
Raine is a prolific critic. In Defence of T. S. Eliot articulated a robust case for Eliot's continued centrality, countering late twentieth-century skepticism with textual analysis and a defense of poetic intelligence. His later collection My Grandmother's Glass Eye: A Look at Poetry gathers essays and lectures that range across canonical and contemporary writing, illustrating his taste for precision, wit, and argumentative clarity. As an essayist, he has been published by leading magazines and review journals, and his pieces often carry the double perspective of practitioner and judge.

He taught at Oxford, notably at New College, where he contributed to the training of new writers and critics. In seminars and tutorials he modeled practical criticism, asking students to attend to cadence, syntax, and figurative reach. Teaching complemented his editorial and reviewing work, and it kept him in daily contact with younger authors, some of whom later appeared under his editorship.

Arete and Later Career
In 1999, Raine founded the magazine Arete, conceived as a place where poetry, fiction, memoir, and criticism could share pages without rigid departmental barriers. As editor, he brought established writers together with new voices, and the magazine's pages often sparked debate. Arete allowed Raine to assert editorial independence and to continue a conversation with readers and writers that stretched back to his earliest reviews. It also kept him connected to the broader London literary scene, where the orbits of poets and novelists like Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Andrew Motion, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Julian Barnes continued to intersect.

Personal Life
Raine married Ann Pasternak Slater, a literary scholar with ties to the Pasternak family and a noted critic in her own right. Her expertise in Russian and English literature has been a meaningful counterpart to Raine's creative and critical work, and her family history informs the Russian passages of History: The Home Movie. Their daughter, the playwright and director Nina Raine, has earned acclaim for stage works that balance quick-witted dialogue with moral and emotional seriousness. Their son, the playwright Moses Raine, has also established himself in the theatre. The household thus connects poetry, scholarship, and drama, and the conversations among its members form a living thread in the story of modern British letters.

Style, Influence, and Legacy
Raine's poems are known for their tactile metaphors and visual imagination, for the way an image can shift perspective and invite readers to re-experience the world. The so-called Martian technique was never a gimmick for him; it was a discipline of looking and a way of recapturing strangeness in the ordinary. As an editor, he helped shape tastes and expectations during a pivotal period for British poetry. As a critic, he defended standards grounded in linguistic sharpness and structural intelligence. As a teacher and magazine editor, he created spaces in which argument and artistry could coexist.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and his career, which spans lyric and long-form poetry, libretto, criticism, and editorship, offers a composite portrait of a writer fully embedded in the life of letters. The people around him, Ann Pasternak Slater in scholarship, Nina Raine and Moses Raine in theatre, and contemporaries such as Christopher Reid, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Andrew Motion, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Ian Hamilton, and James Fenton in the wider literary culture, help show the contexts in which his work has been made, read, and argued over. Craig Raine's legacy rests on a body of writing that changed the angle of vision in English poetry and on a lifetime of argument in defense of attentive reading.

Our collection contains 2 quotes who is written by Craig, under the main topics: Writing - Art.