Best Poets of Classics

Craig Anthony Raine FRSL (born 3 December 1944) is an English poet born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, England. Along with Christopher Reid, he is the best-known exponent of Martian poetry. He was a former Fellow of New College, Oxford from 1991-2010 and is now Emeritus professor. He has been the editor of Areté since 1999.

Career

He 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.

In 1972 he married Ann Pasternak Slater, a now retired fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. They have one daughter and three sons; Nina Raine is a noted director and playwright.

Craig Raine is founder and editor of the literary magazine Areté and a frequent contributor. His works include a number of poetry collections : 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 o..