Kathleen Raine was a poet of intense spiritual vision who aspired to be a 20th-century heir of such religious poets as Thomas Traherne three hundred years before. A diminutive figure, but proud and passionate, she stood self-consciously astride divides such as those between mind and body, the rational and the spiritual, or science and religion, willing them to close by the force of her activities as poet, critic and mystic.

Kathleen Jessie Raine was born in Ilford, Essex, into a strict Methodist household. The start of the First World War occasioned an idyllic childhood era with her aunt, Peggy Black, in the Northumberland village of Bavington. The shadow of Hadrian’s Wall gave shelter not only from conflict but from industrial expansion and the values it promoted.

After the end of the war and her return south, she was educated at the County High School, Ilford. Her subsequent rebellion against the combined oppression of suburbia and puritanism found in her parental home took her to Girton College, Cambridge, where she read Natural Sciences, graduating in 1929. The pervasive presence in her poetry of the knowledge she gained from her studies might seem to be at odds with her later fears about the expansion of science obliterating a “sacred tradition”. But an attempt to reconcile the rational with spiritual enlightenment lies at the heart of her work.

An abortive first marriage to Hugh Sykes-Davies made an unhappy end to her time at Cambridge: she was soon remarried, to Charles Madge, the instigator of Mass Observation. They settled in Blackheath in 1932 and had a son and daughter, but Raine never felt comfortable in this domestic world.

It was, she said, “as if I were living in someone else’s dream”. It ended abruptly in 1938 when she fell in love, passionately, and by her own account for the first time. This lover, whom she secretively referred to as “Alistair”, was called up the following year for war service.

She took her children to her mother’s beach hut in Devon, thence to Penrith, on the outskirts of the Lake District, on the invitation of Michael Roberts and his wife Janet Adam Smith, literary editor of The Listener and one of Raine’s first publishers. That winter she found a cottage in Martindale by Ullswater, where she spent the next year recuperating mentally and physically, and writing book reviews to pay for food at Penrith market.

She was still unsettled, however. Leaving her children in the care of her friend and artistic mentor Helen Sutherland, she returned to London at the end of 1940. Wretched months passed in unsatisfactory jobs before she met the nephew of the Indian mystic Rama Coomaraswamy — Tambimuttu — who invited her to contribute to his new magazine, Poetry London. While scraping together money as a journalist and translator she found inspiration in the arduous times, of which Stone and Flower (1943), illustrated by Barbara Hepworth, was the first published result, followed by Living in Time (1946) and The Pythoness (1949).

Her poetry of the time breathes an air of cold English wind over the virtue of Christian sacrifice: “God in me the four elements of storm / Raging in the shelterless landscape of the mind / Outside the barred doors of my Goneril heart.”

The 1950s were a good time for her, creatively speaking. The Year One (1952) begins, as its title suggests, with a personal and creative tabula rasa. Its opening “Northumbrian Sequence” combines familiar natural imagery with an alarming intensity of selfconsciousness. The muted despair of Theocritus’ pastorals from 25 centuries before becomes more recognisable in a succession of spells and incantations, which break away from the comparative metrical regularity of her earlier work. These spells were largely inspired by Raine’s love for Gavin Maxwell, whose homosexuality rendered their relationship chaste but no less intense for that. The two found common ground in their Northumbrian childhoods — Raine’s mother Jessie had sat behind Maxwell’s in church and admired her coils of hair — and in their fascination with the occult. A passage in the memoirs of the Marquess of Bath describes accompanying Raine to a lecture in the car of a drunken friend, whose antics evidently unsettled her: “The elderly poet-lady appeared much on edge, attempting to restore a semblance of intellectual fibre to the conversation, until she eventually froze into an icy silence.”

Raine stayed frequently in Maxwell’s croft on the Highland isle of Sandaig until the most bizarre of their periodic estrangements saw her lose his beloved otter, Mijbil (whose life is documented in Ring of Bright Water). Raine let the pet swim out to sea one day in April 1956; he was found dead the next day, and Maxwell never forgave her; nor did Raine forgive herself.

Meanwhile she continued to write her lyrics, which seemed to come almost as regularly as breathing. Reviewing her Collected Poems of 1956, Philip Larkin commented that her subject matter set her apart from her contemporaries. “I can think of few recent poems as free from jargon, vulgarity and smartness as those in this book. Her work lacks every quality traditionally associated with the title ‘poetess’: there is no domesticity, no cosiness, and ‘love poems of a personal nature’, the introduction tells us, ‘have also gone’. What remains is the vatic and universal.”

After her estrangement from Maxwell, Raine settled into a house in Paultons Square in Chelsea, which she shared with the artist Cecil Collins and his wife Elizabeth, and which would provide her with a fragile material and domestic stability for the rest of her life. Supporting herself as a journalist, academic and translator, she wrote some of her finest verse in the next few years, publishing it in 1965 in The Hollow Hill.

The Irish resonances in that volume owed much to her study of Yeats, and in Yeats, the Tarot and the Golden Dawn (1972) she drew together threads of Eastern and Western thought as a primary exposition of her “perennial philosophy”, which exercised increasing dominance over her later work, not always to its benefit.

In the meantime, her return to Cambridge as a research fellow at Girton between 1955 and 1961 had borne fruit in her Mellon lectures, Blake and Tradi- tion, a retort to her contemporaries who had once scoffed at him as an idiot savant, and an attempt to explore the richness of Blake’s influences, from Plato and Plotinus to the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita.

This credo, moulded by Coomaraswamy’s teachings of “a universal and unanimous tradition” from which Christianity is but an offshoot, had a practical outlet in her founding, with Keith Critchlow, Philip Sherrard and Brian Keeble, of the journal Temenos in 1981.

Its 13 issues aimed to transcend national cultures and subject boundaries with writing inspired by the “learning of the Imagination”. They attracted the admiration of Sir Laurens van der Post, who showed them in turn to the Prince of Wales. Much taken with Raine’s brand of mysticism, he invited her to found a “sacred grove” of her own in his School of Architecture, to which she invited Indian writers such as Kapila Vatsyayan.

She accounts for the increasing allure of India in her fourth volume of autobiography, India Seen Afar (1988). Its culture and philosophy gave her relief from what she called her “long and largely wasted life” and a place to seek “the end of a golden string”, which in Blake’s words “will bring you in at Heaven’s Gate / Built in Jerusalem’s Wall”.

Raine’s other books included two studies of David Jones. She won the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize (1952), the Oscar Blumenthal Prize (1961), and the Chapelbrook and the Cholmondeley Awards (both 1970). She also won the Smith Literary Award (1972).

She was awarded honorary doctorates by Leicester, Durham and Caen Universities. She won the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1992 and was appointed CBE in 2000.

Her flow of books did not abate, and a handsome revised volume of Collected Poems was published in 2000.

She is survived by a son and daughter.

Kathleen Raine, CBE, poet, was born in London on June 14, 1908. She died on July 7, 2003, aged 95.