Temenos Academy Review 21

Temenos Review is always a rich read to look forward to every year, with a wide range of articles along with extended book reviews, poetry and some art. In a short review, one can only highlight a few items. The editorial by John Carey emphasises the difference between learning about and learning from, adding that the Temenos impulse emphasises the latter without diminishing the importance of the former. Every issue contains a contribution from the late founder, the poet Kathleen Raine, in this case a fascinating account of the roots of her poetry. Her father was an English teacher, and she read natural sciences at Cambridge since literature and poetry were part of life rather than an academic subject. She observes that of all the arts, the living of a life is perhaps the greatest, with poetry not an end in itself but rather in service of life and 'enabling human lives to be lived with insight of a deeper kind, with more sensitive feelings, more intense sense of the beautiful, with deeper understanding.' There is a very good speech by the Prince of Wales on harmony and the land, an essay on CS Lewis as the imaginative man and a profound reflection from Joscelyn Godwin on music as esoteric practice. In the light of my review of the book on vibrational medicine above, it is interesting to read a defence of pure intonation against tempered tuning that interprets a slightly wrong tone is a right one and disrupts our sound classifying mechanism.