SOURCE: Adams, Barbara. “Laura Riding's Poems: A Double Ripeness.” Modern Poetry Studies 11, nos. 1-2 (1982): 189-95.

I labored, as a poet, to bring the poetic endeavor out from the climate of the mere different in wording into an air of utterance in which the ring and spirit and mental movement of true wording and that of familiar wording coincided into a non-differentiability, a quality of human and linguistic universalness. I think that Collected Poems reveals also how my commitment to poetry and my commitment to a universal linguistic solution befitting the general dignity of being human went as far as they could go together.

(Preface, p. 8, The Poems of Laura Riding)

In 1940, at the height of her poetic career, Laura Riding renounced poetry, just two years after the publication of one-hundred eight-one of her poems in Collected Poems. At the time of her renunciation, Riding was thirty-nine and had returned to her native United States after a thirteen-year sojourn in England, Europe and Majorca with Robert Graves. She had established a reputation as a unique poet and intellectual in the vanguard of modernism. As a critic she had helped to foster New Criticism with a method of close textual reading presented in A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), co-authored with Graves.

Before her renunciation, Riding had believed that poetry could apprehend “reality as a whole,” and that it was capable of “uncovering truth.” Until 1940, she believed that writing poetry was a “necessary-natural thing to do.” After her renunciation, Riding no longer believed that poetry was the medium for truth-telling, so, as an absolutist, she wrote no more poems. She continued, however, to seek a “universal linguistic solution” to the human condition in a gargantuan study of language, “A Dictionary of Rational Meaning,” written with her late husband, Schuyler B. Jackson. Only a few parts of this work have been published in literary journals, along with some recent essays, letters and re-prints of a few poems. Following her almost complete withdrawal from the literary world in 1940, Riding's publications declined drastically, as her place in modern poetry slipped from public awareness.

Not until the publication of Riding's Selected Poems—about a third of the Collected Poems—in 1970 in England and 1973 in the United States did she again begin to receive some critical attention. A BBC broadcast of some of her writings in 1967, a tape recording for the Lamont Library in 1972, and her last published work, a prose “evangel,” The Telling in 1972, also helped revive interest in Riding's work. The bulk of her poems, however, out of print since 1938, was largely unavailable to interested critics and new readers.

The 1980 edition, The Poems of Laura Riding, published in England and the United States, finally makes Riding's poetry available in its entirety to her international audience. This book duplicates the original Collected Poems, preface and 181 poems in the same order, and adds a new preface and an appendix containing notes on a poem, a previously uncollected early poem, the original 1938 preface, excerpts from the preface to Selected Poems, and excerpts from the Lamont Library tape. Laura Riding has published this new edition of her poetry under the name Laura (Riding) Jackson, the signature she has preferred since 1967. The problem of recognition has been solved by the new title which includes the name by which she is best known, Laura Riding.

Laura Riding's life and art have always been intimately related, bearing out her extremist aesthetics in the very texture and substance of her writing. The poetry, in fact, tells the “story” of the persona's developing self, as Riding explained in the 1938 Preface to Collected Poems: “This book begins with my earliest poems, and its arrangement corresponds with the development of my poetic activity. I have omitted those poems which seemed to fall outside the story. …”

Like the original collection, The Poems of Laura Riding is divided into five parts, the first four of which correspond with events in the author's life from her childhood in New York City, through her years with Graves in England and on Majorca, and ending with Christmas 1937 following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War which caused her and Graves to flee Majorca. With the outside world as backdrop, the poems actually focus on the author's inner life and her attempts to forge an ideal self in her poetry. The first four parts match “occasions” in her interior life—“Poems of Mythical Occasion,” “Poems of Immediate Occasion,” “Poems of Final Occasion” and “Poems Continual.” The fifth part, “Histories,” falls outside chronological sequence with the whole, but still bears on the life of the poet's mind in three very long narrative poems written in 1921, 1931 and 1933, respectively. The first of these, “Voltaire,” was written while Riding attended Cornell where she met and married her first husband, a history instructor, Louis Gottschalk. The second of the Histories, “Laura and Francisca,” was written during Riding's first year in Deya, Majorca, and describes her inner and outer life there. The last, “The Life of the Dead,” is a severely critical allegory of modern life, written in French with complementary English text and surreal illustrations.

Riding's poems range from seven to several hundred lines, but generally fall into two kinds: a lyric of about thirty to sixty lines, and the long sequence in several parts of a few hundred lines. The imagery often seems abstract and intellectual rather than sensory. The language, however, is precise and demands that the reader create the imagery from the thought. The thought can be difficult, a philosophical concept of states of being, as in this Dickinson-like stanza from “Echoes” (1926):

My address? At the cafés, cathedrals,
Green fields, marble terminals—
I teem with place
When? Any moment finds me,
Reiterated morsel
Expanded into space.

Such expressions of the self in relation to space and time crop up often in Riding's poetry, justifying Auden's claim that she is “the most philosophical poet” of our time.

If there is one word that characterizes a Riding poem it is “self.” A number of shorter lyrics examine the self, seeking the “one self,” charting the poet's “diary of identity,” and discovering a self at war with itself, “the enemy self.” As R. P. Blackmur said in 1939, Riding's poetry reveals a woman “obsessed with the problem of identity.” As the poet seeks a unified self, three themes weave throughout the poetry, three possible solutions to her inner division: denial of the claims of sexuality; escape into death; and escape into art. The poet hopes to transcend sexuality through an act of will, self-denial. The goal is spiritual chastity, if not actual chastity, as the priestess-like speaker expresses in “The Virgin” (1925):

My flesh is at a distance from me.
Yet approach and touch it.
It is as near as anyone can come.

Yielding to sexual needs only leads to trouble, deception and abandonment. Of her marriage to “Bill Bubble” in the very first poem of the collection, the poet says “I feel like dead.” “Not dead but wed,” he answers the bride who is soon left alone with the cold comfort of the moon and “Old Trouble,” the woman's curse.

In later poems, sexuality and the act of love itself can be perfected by conversion into art. Words transcend the act, poetry triumphs over the flesh in “When Love Becomes Words” (1937) in which “a poem upon love” makes one forget the actual kiss and is ultimately “more love than kiss to lips.”

The achievement of a self that is perfect, unified and even more real than life is the goal of Riding's poetry. Therefore, death is a kind of perfection she seeks, for it frees the self completely from human concerns and relationships. Riding's obsession with death spilled over from her life into her poetry. A nearly fatal fall from a fourth floor window in 1929 was apparently the culmination of two years' rumination on self-destruction. In 1927, she wrote “Death As Death,” comparing death to a comforter soothing away her troubles “like a quick cold hand / On the hot slow head of suicide.” The most obvious example, however, of the close relationship between Riding's art and eventual suicidal act appears in “In Nineteen Twenty-seven,” a dark meditative soliloquy ominously presaging the jump from a window two years later. In the poem, the poet examines the world of 1927 and finds it deceptive, deformed, and wanting. Examining herself, she finds a serious flaw, a “double ripeness” of self. The conflict lies between the woman who would go with her lover, accepting the cycle of time as it turns from 1927 to the new year, 1928; and the poet who would deny her lover and her own love and literally stop the clock with her own death.

Then, where was I, of this time and my own
A double ripeness and perplexity?
Fresh year of time, desire,
Late year of my age, renunciation—
Ill-mated pair, debating if the window
Is worth leaping out of, and by whom.

Wishing to leave a world peopled with “dressed skeletons,” seeing herself as one more “ghostly” inhabitant, the poet who wrote these lines in 1927 reached the crisis in 1929.

Riding recovered from the fall, and, for a time, found inner peace, enabling her to continue to write more poems, stories, two novels, critical essays and to run the Seizin Press with Graves. By 1938, when the Collected Poems came out, Riding had fully explored one more solution to the problem of self before her final renunciation of poetry rather than her life. This was the solution through art. “The Last Covenant” is the pact the poet makes with truth, inspiriting her with the grace to abide in the “unitary somewhere.” Like Wallace Stevens, Riding created a fictive heroine to bridge the gap between the real and the imaginary world. In her poems, at least, she came close to perfecting the self, to finding an aesthetic solution to the human condition.

Riding found a voice in her divided self, but where Stevens rejoiced in the supreme fiction created by his imagination which allowed him to incorporate reality in his poetic vision, Riding insisted that the supreme reality was the word-created self. Ideal and real could not co-habit in peace within her. Thus, for as long as she continued to write poetry, Riding sought to bring forth the perfect self. And this could be achieved only by the suppression, demotion and near-extinction of the flesh-and-blood self who held the pen.

Perhaps the best poem in the collection, one which illustrates the aesthetic solution to the poet's conflict with life, is “Memories of Mortalities” (1936), an autobiographical sequence that shows the emergence of Riding's poetic self. Consisting of four hundred fifty-four lines, it is her longest single poem, divided into three chronological parts. As the poem records key experiences in the poet's inner development, we watch in sympathetic fascination as she discards Mother, Father, School and social pressures—layers of superimposed selves which must be jettisoned before she can shape her own identity. The speaker, a wide-eyed innocent, confronts this fictional-seeming world and tries to establish her own reality with her pen. The process is slow and painful, summarized brilliantly in the phrase, “the stuttering slow grammaring of self.”

In “Memories of Mortalities,” Riding discovered how to manipulate narrative and to avoid literal autobiography by creating intense moments of drama. It is a technique which certainly points towards recent confessional poetry, making use of childhood memory, pseudo-naive viewpoint, striking outbursts of direct discourse and, always, the I at the center. Moreover, the dramatic element is so strong in the second part, “My Father and My Childhood,” that the character of the father stands out in strong relief as if drawn by Dickens. Riding's story of her father resonates with echoes of great tales of character, from Aesop's sly but foolish fox to Robert Lowell's ineffectual, beloved father in Life Studies. Even in this portrait, however, Riding keeps her eye on the truth disguised by petty illusions, life's “threadbare fiction,” as her father advises:

All is mistrust and mischief.
Bestiality and bestial comfort.
Life is a threadbare fiction
Large the holes and thin the patches.

Passing from snake-mother, fox-father, through sickness and schooling, the poet completes the rite of passage to enter her visionary world with her “internal eye” (I). The poem, then, becomes the agency of a more real, created self, welding imagination to experience. Factual details and autobiography provide vivid imagery, of course, but they serve more importantly as landmarks along the route to show where the poet has been, what she has come through, on her way to achieving her real identity. Looking back at the end of her “memories of mortalities,” she can now “go back / And write my story myself”:

So I began to live.
It was outrageous,
I made mortal mistakes,
I did not mean to live so mortally.
But something must be written about me,
And not by them.

The themes of Riding's poetry are no longer unique in a modern lyric poetry committed to the evocation of the inner I. But when she wrote her poems between 1921 and 1938, Riding ran against the trends of Imagism, Eliotic traditionalism, and the new mythologies advocated by Hart Crane, once her close friend, or by Graves, her long-time associate. Her poems, though telling the story of self, veer away from mere documentation of actual experience and move into the creation of an ideal self liberated from the constraints of the Zeitgeist. Like her friend and contemporary, Gertrude Stein, Riding also strove to strip words down to essential meanings, to create a pure language. Unlike Stein, however, she was able to project her ideal self onto an abstract but familiar interior landscape, irradiated by a perfect balance of intellect and imagination. Her persona is thus highly individualized, yet archetypal. Her language is abstract, yet precise and surprisingly rich in imagery. Her persona emerges from the life of one being, but also from the primordial ooze and from the Word of Genesis:

It was the beginning of time
When selfhood first stood up in the slime
It was the beginning of pain
When an angel spoke and was quiet again.

Because of her own long withdrawal from the literary world, Riding is not widely known today, though she has written some of the most intellectually superior and penetrating visions of self in modern poetry. Her influence on other poets, however, has been wide. Among those who acknowledge her influence are Robert Graves, Robert Duncan, Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery and W. H. Auden. The secret of that influence, according to Ted Hughes, lies in the language and in her “religious” drive towards truth, towards an “abstract, suicidally-high demand for an ideal.”

This long-awaited new edition of Riding's Collected Poems, The Poems of Laura Riding, should give new readers a chance to feel the power of these poems first-hand, and old readers a chance to admire again their long-neglected beauty—like a diamond discovered in the dust.