Laura Riding
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Laura (Riding) Jackson (January 16, 1901 – September 2, 1991) was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer.
She was born Laura Reichenthal in New York to a family of Austrian Jewish immigrants, and educated at Cornell University, where she began to write poetry, publishing first (1923-26) under the name Laura Riding Gottschalk. She became associated with the Fugitives and shared much of their poetic credo. Her first marriage, to the historian Louis Gottschalk, ended in divorce in 1925, at the end of which year she went to England at the invitation of Robert Graves and his wife Nancy Nicholson. She would remain in Europe for nearly 14 years.
Her first collection of poetry, The Close Chaplet, was published in 1926, and during the following year she assumed the surname Riding. By this time her poetry had become much more original: generally abandoning traditional metres for a highly unconventional form of free verse. She, Robert Graves, and Nancy Nicholson were based in London until Riding's failed suicide-attempt in 1929. It is generally agreed that this episode was a major cause of the break up of Graves's first marriage: the whole affair caused a famous literary scandal. Thereafter, until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Riding and Graves lived in Deya, Mallorca, where they were visited by writers and artists including James Reeves, Norman Cameron, John Aldridge, Len Lye, Jacob Bronowski, and Honor Wyatt. Progress of Stories (1935) would later be highly esteemed by John Ashbery and Harry Mathews among others. Between 1936 and 1939 Riding and Graves lived in England, France, and Switzerland; Graves accompanied Riding on her return to the USA in 1939. In that year they parted, and she married Schuyler B. Jackson in 1941.
Riding and Graves were highly productive from the start of their association, though after they moved to Majorca they became even more so. While still in London they had set up (1927) a private press (the Seizin Press), collaborated on A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) (which some believe inaugurated the New Criticism), A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928), and other works. In Majorca the Seizin Press was enlarged to become a publishing imprint, producing inter alia the substantial hardbound critical magazine Epilogue (1935-1938), edited by Riding with Graves as associate editor. Throughout their association both of them steadily produced volumes of major poetry, culminating for each with a Collected Poems in 1938.
In about 1941 Riding renounced poetry, though it would be fifteen to twenty years before she would feel able to explain her reasons. She withdrew from public literary life, working with Schuyler Jackson on a dictionary that would lead them into an exploration of the foundations of meaning and language. In April 1962 she read 'Introduction for a Broadcast' for the BBC Third Programme, her first formal statement of her reasons for renouncing poetry (there had been a brief reference-book entry in 1955). An expanded version of the piece was published that year in the New York magazine Chelsea, which also published 'Further on Poetry' in 1964, writings on the theme of women-and-men in 1965 and 1974, and in 1967 'The Telling'. The 62 numbered passages of this 'personal evangel' formed the 'core-part' of a book of the same title (Athlone 1972, Harper & Row 1973, Carcanet 2005), itself arguably the core-part of her life's work. Writings and publications continued to flow throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties, as Laura (Riding) Jackson (her authorial name from 1963-64 onwards) explored what she regarded as the truth-potential of language free from the artificial restrictions of poetic art. 'My faith in poetry was at heart a faith in language as the elementary wisdom', she had written in 1976. Her later writings affirm what she regarded as the truth-potential contained in language and in the human mind.
Two entire issues of Chelsea were given over to new writings by her, It Has Taken Long (1976) and The Sufficient Difference (2001). Publication of her work has continued since her death in 1991, including First Awakenings (her early poems) (1992), Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words' (1997), 'The Poems of Laura Riding, A Newly Revised Edition of the 1938/1980 Collection (2001), and Under The Mind's Watch (2004). The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language is forthcoming in 2007, and Later-Life Commentaries in 2008.
[edit] Further reading
- Elizabeth Friedmann, A Mannered Grace: the Life of Laura (Riding) Jackson (Persea Books, 2005). ISBN 0-89255-300-6
- Alan J. Clark, "Laura (Riding) Jackson: a revised check-list March 1923-January 2001", pp.147-179 in The Sufficient Difference: a Centenary Celebration of Laura (Riding) Jackson (NY: Chelsea Associates, 2000) (Chelsea 69). ISSN 0009-2185
- Elizabeth Friedmann (ed) The Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader, (Persea Books, 2005). ISBN 0-89255-263-8
