On Jackson

’s Poetry Essay, Research Paper

Laura

(Riding) Jackson’s poetry and criticism are intricately linked in their inquery into

the paradoxical nature of human expression and feeling.

After “practicing” poetry from the early 1920s to 1938, she

renounced poetry saying that its no longer served as a means of expressing the modern

word/world.

Poetry bears in itself the message that

it is the destiny of human beings to speak the meaning of being, but it nurses it in

itself as in a sacred apartness, not to be translated into the language of common meanings

in its delivery. I was able to achieve in my

poems a use of words that paid respect to the poetic motive of difference in word-use and

respect at the same time to language as essentially one with itself, not divided into

levels of meaning. But the constraints that

the poetic techniques of difference impose on word-use limit the speaking-range and the

meaning-effectuality of language to a miniature human and linguistic universalness. My kind of seriousness, in my looking to poetry

for the rescue of human life from the indignities it was capable of visiting upon itself,

led me to an eventual turning away from it as failing my kind of seriousness.

from

Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Introduction” to The

Poems of Laura Riding: A New Edition of the 1938 Collection (NY: Persea Books, Inc.,

1980).

David Perkins

[(Riding)

Jackson’s] poems have the action of intelligence as their form and content. Often they are argument; assertions are made,

explained, defended, justified, sometimes questioned and countered. In such poems her language may be plain, general,

and colloquial. Other poems more resemble the

Metaphysical mode (or the version of it that developed in the twenties) and continue a

metaphor while exploring its implications: for example, the metaphors of maps in “The

Map of Places” and that of jewels in “Auspices of Jewels.” Her syntax is generally compressed and elliptical,

and she musters an idiosyncratic, resourceful diction (“secretless,”

“usedness”) with compounds (“lover-round,” “day-change,”

“Self-wonder”). Her perceptions

tend to be especially alert to automatic routines of feeling and language. “The final outrage” is a stock phrase;

typically correcting it by writing “outrage unfinal” (in “Memories of

Mortalities”), Riding comments on both the true state of affairs and the false state

of our language, or more exactly, of our ordinary, unthinking use of it. Poems such as “Postponement of Self” and

“As Well as Any Other” articulate her rejection of nineteenth-century poetic

conventions. Her truth-telling can be

aggressively downright, but is often expressed with paradox and irony. Irony is seldom her final position, however, for

her mind is more conscientious than it is open, and her predications, though complex, are

not tentative. At her best she compresses

original insights into forceful, surprising phrases.

from

David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry:

Modernism and After (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987). p.9

Barbara

Adams

Riding’s poetry has elements common to much recent American

poetry—the search for a unified identity, an obsession with death and hope of

transcendence through art. It is a

self-conscious and tension-ridden poetry, but more detached and abstract than that of her

contempraries. Where Hart Crane invented a

mythology from a fusion of self, word, and world, Riding created an aesthetic from self

and word only. Where Eliot found his voice in

the past, Riding found hers in an eternal inner self.

Where Wallace Stevens rejoiced in the supreme fiction created by his

imagination, Riding insisted that the word-created self was more real than reality. The self, to Riding, is the supreme reality. And where Edwin Arlington Robinson—reported

by Riding to be one of her first influences—created a variety of neurotics to express

alienation, Riding invented (or inhabited) only a single persona whose inner dialectic

allowed a full expression of her thoughts and feelings.

What is special about Riding’s poetry is that it is a continuous

interior monologue, telling the story of her inner being.

This is the rationale of the Collected

Poems establishing a self in poetry, “more real, because more true.”

from

Barbara Adams, “Laura Riding’s Autobiographical Poetry: ‘My Muse as

I’” in Concerning Poetry 15 (Fall

1982): 71-87.

Peter S. Temes

(Riding)

Jackson achieved a certan authority through her rejection [of poetry after 1938], casting

out along with her poems the vulnerability that attends statement, refusing the risk of

becoming the object of someone else’s interpretation.

By disavowing her poetry, she also disavowed, implicitly, all who would

attempt to interpret it, for they would have to begin by assuming that in it l

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