Laura Riding directed her main energies as a poet towards the creation of an ideal self in an ideal language. She worked hard to find a means of stabilizing the self in an uncompromising real world, producing in the process a major body of poetry, criticism, fiction and letters in fifteen busy years—1923 to 1938. All in all, by 1938 she had published nine volumes of poetry, four books of criticism (two in collaboration with Robert Graves), two novels, two collections of short stories and dozens of essays. Moreover, with Robert Graves she founded and operated the Seizin Press which published handsome limited editions of poems and essays by themselves, Gertrude Stein and others. And yet, some time in 1940, just two years after the publication of her Collected Poems in England and her native United States, Riding gave up writing poetry and removed herself from the literary world.

Perfection, perhaps, had proved too hard a taskmaster. Riding's idealism, along with a sure linguistic sense and a deep autobiographical drive, had provided her poetry with its power and its purpose. She demanded that poetry serve truth, just as she demanded that it serve the real self. For all intents and purposes, Riding's view of poetry, up to 1940, was religious. She expressed its moral purpose in the original preface to Collected Poems: “To live in, by, for the reasons of, poems is to habituate oneself to the good existence.”¹ Forty years after giving poetry up, she makes her former position even more explicit in the new introduction to the 1980 re-issuing of the same collection: “I was religious in my devotion to poetry.”² Whatever other psychological reasons there may have been, the attempt to live up to such a high moral standard in her life and art probably had much to do with Riding's extreme actions: the suicide attempt in 1929, and the leaving off of writing poetry after 1938. Her moral aesthetics could not settle for almost-perfect.

Riding's Collected Poems, re-issued as The Poems of Laura Riding in 1980, records the quest for perfection as it is closely bound to her life and thought. Each poem tells us something about the real woman, but each one also makes a bid for something more, a higher state of being. As she announced with such conviction in the 1938 preface, “existence in poetry becomes more real than existence in time—more real because more good, more good because more true.”³ The good, the true, and the poetic self are Riding's trinity of faith, the creed upon which she founded her craft. We have only to look at the preface to the 1970 Selected Poems to understand how consistent is this faith, even to the renunciation of poetry because Riding became aware of “the discrepancy between the creed and the craft of poetry … its religious and its ritualistic aspects.”⁴

Riding believes literally in the perfectability of language and of the self. In theory, the perfect self can be embodied in perfect language; the relationship between self and language is therefore crucial to her work. In one of her early books of criticism, she had said plainly, that “a poem is an advanced degree of self” and that poetry was “the tongue of the Self.”⁵ This creed required the language of revelation, and, for a time, poetry was that language. After 1940, Riding came to believe that poetry was too elitist, too much a “crafted” medium to serve the democracy of revelation. Similarly, she found that the individual self could not be perfected except as part of the One perfect self. This later doctrine has been fully expressed in Riding's 1972 evangel, The Telling. Today, she believes that perfection lies in the “rational meaning” of words, in the apprehension of ultimate being in Oneness through language. The high moral purpose remains consistent in Riding's thought, but the instrument of its working out has changed from poetry to language as a whole, from a particular poetic self to an all-inclusive one self.

Nevertheless, out of her desire to achieve perfection in poetry, and out of the tension between the ideal self of the poems and the imperfect actual self, Riding created more than two hundred poems. She incorporated one hundred eighty-one of them in the Collected Poems to tell the “story” of her struggle to develop her real or poetic self. This book represents one of the earliest, perhaps the first in the modernist tradition, consciously autobiographical poetic sequences. Its arrangement is a narrative one, according to the Preface, the poems being ordered to correspond chronologically with phases in the protagonist's life. The “heroine” is Riding's self, and the “plot” tells of her experiences in America, England and Spain. These locations help the reader correlate the fictional world of the poems to actual events in the poet's life.

The autobiographical arrangement follows a simple thematic development divided into five parts. The first four parts record events in sequence in the persona's life from childhood to Christmas 1937, the title of one of the last poems in the fourth section. The focus is on interior developments in her thinking, rather than on external happenings. The word “occasion” signifies the nature of the first three phases of thought, while “continual” suggests the final phase that is reached in part four. “Poems of Mythical Occasion,” the first section, covers the years 1910 to 1926 approximately, corresponding to Riding's childhood and young womanhood. The chief motifs concern questions of identity against a background of an unhappy family and an alien environment, and sexual anxiety. The first poem in the book sets the theme:

The stove was grey, the coal was gone.
In and out of the same room
One went, one came.
On turned into nothing.
One turned into whatever
Turns into children.(6)

Later stanzas in this early sequence prefigure the long debate Riding was to have with herself concerning the pleasures, pains and tyranny of sexuality:

Love's the only thing
That deceives enjoyably.
Mother Mary and her Magdalenes,
We don't care a curse how much we're deceived
Or deceive.
Bill Bubble in a bowler hat
Walking by picked Lida up.
Lida said ‘I feel like dead.’
Bubble said
‘Not dead but wed.’
No more trouble, no more trouble,
Safe in the arms of Husband Bubble.

The fictitious name “Lida” further underscores Riding's identification with heroines at the heart of our sexual mythologies which impale woman on phallic fantasies.

“Poems of Immediate Occasion,” the second part of Collected Poems, covers the brief period Riding spent in England, 1926-1929. A time of intense conflict and productivity, these years saw the resolution of the conflict with Graves and his wife, the beginning of Riding's international reputation as poet and critic, and the near-death of Riding in a fall from a high window. While identity remains the central concern, the doubts of a woman in love and a growing obsession with death dominate this section. These themes merge in a five-part poem which ostensibly describes the false gaiety of the year 1927, but which actually reveals the poet's mounting and terrible inner conflict. These lines from “In Nineteen Twenty-Seven” even expose her suicidal thoughts some two years before obeying that impulse:

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.

“Poems of Final Occasion,” the third section, covers the years 1930-1935, including crisis and recovery and the shift from England to Majorca. Besides the usual existential questions of identity, these poems begin to come to terms with life and death in a matter-of-fact way, and to find peace of mind in the very act of writing the poem. At last, the poet can say, “At last we can make sense, you and I, / You lone survivors on paper.” At the same time, she still wars with herself and the eternal questions of identity:

What is to be?
It is to bear a name.
What is to die?
It is to be name only.
And what is to be born?
It is to choose the enemy self
To learn impossibility from.
And what is to have hope?
Is it to choose a god weaker than self,
And pray for compliments?

The bitter truths of this catechism leave the poet alone, with no resource and no other god, none but “the enemy self.” As despairing as is this faith in the self, Riding salvages some faith in a more traditional God, “meeting” him in death and discovering that His callous creation of her is little different from her creation of poems. According to this progression of thought, the poet bears a quasi-godlike status because of his “mouth”:

Because of being by name a poet,
A creature neither man nor God.
Yes, such a creature by name,
But featured like both man and God—
Like God a creature of mind,
Like man, a creature of mouth.

“Poems Continual,” the fourth and last of the chronological sections, contain the last poems Riding wrote while living on Majorca with Robert Graves, ending late in 1936 when the Spanish Civil War forced their evacuation. This move also effectively ended their relationship, though it dragged on for a few more years while they roamed about Europe and England and eventually came back to the United States. There, Riding and Graves parted for good, and Riding met and married Schuyler S. Jackson, her second husband (Riding had been married briefly in her early twenties to a history professor she met while a student at Cornell). These last poems reveal some of the turmoil of world events in the Thirties, but their main emphasis is on the persona's maturation into a self-possessed woman able to cope more easily with questions of identity through her poetry. They also show a decided cooling of love's sexual urgency and an ability to sublimate even that in poetry, especially in the self-explanatory poem “When Love Becomes Words”:

And I shall say to you, ‘There is needed now
A poem upon love, to forget the kiss by
And be more love than kiss to the lips.’
The writing of ‘I love you’
Contains the love if not entirely
At least with lovingness enough
To make the rest a shadow around us. …

Another notable achievement of this final stage of self is the sequence “Memories of Mortalities,” a four hundred fifty four line autobiography of the poet's inner life which recapitulates the major theme of the entire Collected Poems. It begins with her birth, assuming the burdens of the human condition through her “snake” mother and “fox” father, shows her futile rebellion against mortality and schooling, and leads to the poet's break-through in achieving an independent identity by “writing her story herself.”

“Histories,” the fifth and last part of Collected Poems, stands slightly to one side of the developing poet's story but parallels its main themes. It consists of three long sequences which represent important experiments in the longer poem and mixed media. “Voltaire,” written in 1921 when Riding was a student at Cornell, is a biography of the philosopher's beliefs and doubts, recounted in twelve parts, each part introduced by a prose paragraph and followed by clever, slyly neo-classical verse. In this choice of subject, Riding shows at the age of twenty a decided taste for rational thought. In form, the poem shows a precocity that dazzles critics and fellow poets alike. Roy Fuller notes, for instance, “Voltaire's” “varied and original poetic texture and its individual solution of the problem of the long poem in our age.”⁷

“Laura and Francisca,” the second of the Histories, combines vivid autobiographical details of Riding and Graves's life on Majorca. A fey little girl called Francisca symbolizes the ideal inner being of the poem's chief character “Laura.” Written soon after their arrival on Majorca and not long after the traumatic events of Riding's near-death and Graves's divorce from Nancy Nicholson, the poem records the surface details of everyday life in simple, sensuous language. Visitors, meals, mail, domestic trifles and the hard work of operating the hand-press take up the time while “Laura” and “Robert” heal their wounds. But Francisca represents the other Laura, the “anti-narcissus of me,” the poet's Muse: “My muse is I,” says the poem's Laura. Thus, in 1930, Riding reaffirmed her poetic philosophy—a poetics of the self that made explicit use of any autobiographical data, the real and the imagined.

“The Life of the Dead” written in 1933 is the last of the Histories and by far the most idiosyncratic of Riding's poems. A surreal allegory of the modern world, this poem of more than a thousand lines depicts vanity fair in ten tableaux. Each of the ten poem-pictures is written first in French and then in English, and is accompanied by an illustration. The illustrations were conceived by Riding and executed by John Aldrich in a deChirico manner. Of all the poems, “The Life of the Dead” is the most directly involved with social and moral concerns in the immediate world. A virtuoso satire constructed with dazzling skill, it reveals Riding's Swiftian side—the self turned towards the real world, seeking its perfection along with her own. All three Histories, though widely different in outward form and subject, share the same concern for the integrity of the self and the necessity for cherishing it in an historically, geographically and morally unstable world.

The careful structure and inner consistency of Riding's Collected Poems are no less remarkable than the authoritative quality of the poet's voice. That voice is obviously dominated by intelligence but contains as well a strong element of intuition that emerges from the center of being. Riding's voice derives from a similar combination of intellect and intuition found in Emerson—an interior monologue that scrutinizes self with puritan fervor. It also resembles Dickinson's, whose voice, said Henry James, “maps the landscape of the soul.” This tradition in American poetry leads its poets deeper and deeper into the self, into an endless ontological quest. It is what gives it its characteristic religious flavor, redolent of Biblical rhythms, imagery and syntax as in Riding's early poem “Incarnations”:

Do not deny,
Do not deny, thing out of thing.
Do not deny in the new vanity
The old, original dust.
From what grave, what past of flesh and bone
Dreaming, dreaming I lie
Under the fortunate curse,
Bewitched, alive, forgetting the first stuff …
Death does not give a moment to remember in
Lest, like a statue's too transmuted stone,
I grain by grain recall the original dust
And looking down a stair of memory, keep saying:
This was never I.

The thrust of this kind of poetry is always towards the solution of the problems of identity. If “this was never I,” then what is I becomes the task of the poem. The chief solution for Riding, found frequently in the later poems, is to enter a “unitary somewhere” in poetry. Here, the self exists in pure perfection, rescued from time and the transitory pleasures and pains of living. In Riding's aesthetic, she makes a “last convenant” with truth—the truth in poetry: “‘I have arrived here / And will discover to myself what is here.’” That this solution was only hoped for but never fully achieved in her poems led to the abrupt cessation of Riding's morally-demanding poetry. The autobiography of the self, its interior monologue, fell silent after the publication of the Collected Poems.

Riding's poetry has elements common to much recent American poetry—the search for a unified identity, an obsession with death and the hope of transcendence through art. It is a self-conscious and tension-ridden poetry, but more detached and abstract than that of her contemporaries. 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.”

The influence of Riding's poetry on other poets has long been recognized by critics and, occasionally, by the affected poets themselves. Auden and Graves are the most notable examples, but the list includes the more recent poets John Ashbery, Robert Duncan and Sylvia Plath. With the exception of Plath, all of these poets were supposed to have learned some matter of technique—syntax, negatives, abstract diction, metres, “thin-lipped style.” (Auden's case has been recently well documented by David Mendelson.) And Plath, according to one critic, is supposed to have been inspired by Riding's BBC reading of some poems, or by her association with Graves and The White Goddess, to express mourning for her dead father. So far, however, critics have failed to comment on Riding's use of autobiographical data as a forerunner to the recent “confessional” poets, especially Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. At the very least, Riding deserves credit for making conscious use of the self as the only worthwhile subject left to lyric poetry. The effects of Riding's formal techniques can be demonstrated in poems by Auden and Graves, but the effects of her self-conscious obsession with the development of her real self in poetry cannot be so easily traced—for one reason, that it has become a commonplace since Lowell's Life Studies. For another, the tradition of self-examination in lyric poetry is as old as the Psalms of David; and in the English-speaking tradition, poets can find taproots in Wordsworth's The Prelude and Whitman's “Song of Myself.”

But for the sake of argument, let us look at a few closer correlatives between Riding and Plath, and Riding and Lowell. Besides having been impressed by Riding's BBC broadcast in 1962, Plath also shared similar views of sex and death, expressed in hostile-aggressive language. For instance, Riding's “Auspice of Jewels” shows a woman revolting against male dominance through enslaving protectiveness symbolized by their gifts of jewels. The false glitter of these jewels eclipses the real glitter of the woman's real self:

They have connived at those jewelled fascinations
That to our hands and arms and ears
And heads and necks and feet
And all the winding stalk
Extended the mute spell of the face.
For we are now otherwise luminous.
The light which was spent in jewels
Has performed upon the face
A gradual eclipse of recognition.

In “Purdah,” Plath voices a similar rebellion, using some of the same jewel imagery and false reflection of femaleness in male eyes. “Purdah” of course symbolizes the same kind of male-imposed slavery disguised as protectiveness:

Jade—
Stone of the side,
The agonized
Side of a green Adam, I
Smile, cross-legged,
Enigmatical,
Shifting my clarities.
So valuable!
How the sun polishes this shoulder!
I gleam like a mirror.
At this facet the bridegroom arrives.
Lord of the mirrors!
It is himself he guides. …(8)

There is also the similarity between Riding and Plath of a desire for spiritual chastity. Riding's poem “The Virgin” proposes such purity by detaching her real self from her body.

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

And Plath achieves the same purity with a high fever in “Fever 103,” becoming “a pure acetylene Virgin” just as untouchable: “I am too pure for you or anyone.” Another feeling they share is vulnerability from self-exposure. Using the language of the want ad, Riding sends out an “Advertisement” of self that offers to meet another on the level of real self:

Have quantity guaranteed self
Willing affiliate with private party.
Respond in person.
Inquire within.
Frankness or secrecy
Need not apply. …

In “The Applicant,” the impersonal language of the interview divests Plath of personalty crutches. What remains for the prospective buyer-bridegroom is a naked, helpless self ready for him to dress according to his needs:

I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit—
Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?(9)

Not to be overlooked is the obsession with death—the death of self—that weaves a dark theme in so many of Riding and Plath's poems. Riding can be ominous, philosophical or even flippant on this subject. At a crucial time in her life, death was “a quick cold hand / On the hot slow head of suicide.” A short time later, it is the cure for all suffering, especially the suffering of a “living name.” Much later, Riding can quip that she has “met God” who is busy wringing the neck of a dove as she sets about to describe “an interval called death.” The sum effect of Riding's shifting attitude is that we aren't sure if she means literal death, spiritual death, or some sort of playful literary death. In Plath's case, we are on surer if unhappier ground. Death in Plath means death as we know it, and her self-exploitation of her suicidal wish is too well known. Yet, the starkness of this negation is softened and made poetically palatable with considerable joking irony. Compare the flippant tone of this passage from Riding's “Then Follows” with that of Plath's “Death & Co.” and consider if there might not be some influence of the former on the latter:

It came about by chance—
I met God.
‘What,’ he said, ‘you already?’
‘What,’ I said, ‘you still?’
He apologized and I apologized.
‘I thought I was alone,’ he said.
‘Are you displeased?’ I said.
‘I suppose I should not be,’ he said.
A dove hopped out of his sleeve
And muted well in his palm.
Frowning, he wrung its neck.
‘Are there any more of you?’ he said,
Tears in his eyes, but politely.
‘As many as you care to meet,’ I said.
Tears falling, he said politely,
‘I can't wait, but remember me to them.’

And this passage from “Death & Co.”:

Two, of course there are two.
It seems perfectly natural now—
The one who never looks up, whose eyes are
                    lidded
And balled, like Blake's,
Who exhibits
The birthmarks that are his trademark—
The scald scar of water,
The nude
Verdigris of the condor.
I am red meat. His beak
Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.
He tells me how badly I photograph. …(10)

If Riding did influence Plath, it is certainly in the daring direct treatment of painful subjects, sometimes lightened with humor, or distanced with skillful poetic tricks of diction, voice and syntax.

Plath's most important teacher, Robert Lowell, made autobiographical poetry fashionable with his 1960's book Life Studies. Cleaning out the family attic, he paraded its skeletons and saints, its heroes and harridans before an American public eager to see the other side of their puritan ancestors. But among the family portraits he painted, he painted none more honestly and compellingly than that of himself. The portrait of the poet in extreme pain is Lowell's most telling subject; and like Joyce, he uses his own voice as a child to tell on himself. What proved an effective technique for literary autobiography in Joyce's prose and Lowell's poetry was just as effective in Riding's 1935 autobiographical sequence, “Memories of Mortalities.” Riding uses a variety of methods to solve the problems of a long, narrative lyric poem, but we are concerned here with only one of them: the poet's voice as a child used to distance the pain of being a poet. Here, for instance, is how Riding describes her father, a lovable but irresponsible Micawber with pretentions of wisdom:

There came the fox my father,
Between the tales to ponder, speak
The gruff philosophies of foxes:
‘All is mistrust and mischief,
Bestiality and bestial comfort.
Life is a threadbare fiction—
Large the holes and thin the patches. …

And here is a section from Lowell's portrait of his father, “Commander Lowell”:

“Anchors aweigh,” Daddy boomed in his bathtub,
Anchors aweigh,”
when Lever Brothers offered to pay
him double what the Navy paid.
I nagged for his dress sword with gold braid, …
He was soon fired. Year after year,
he still hummed “Anchors aweigh” in the tub—
whenever he left a job,
he bought a smarter car.(11)

Coincidence that both have improvident, juvenile fathers with grandiose ideas; also coincidence, perhaps, that both poets speak from similar positions as children made wise too young by having to cater to their father's fancies. Less coincidental is the form of narrative based on factual memory, with speech interpolations.

And even stronger resemblance of this child-voice and narrative technique can be seen in the “Sickness and Schooling” section of Riding's poem. Here, Riding exploits the impassioned cries of a frightened child in a way that would seem an obvious model for Lowell's little boy in “My Last Afternoon With Uncle Devereux Winslow.” The passage in Riding's poem begins with the memory of illness, the little girl in bed afraid of pain and the illness-induced distortions and hallucinations:

‘It hurts,’ we cried, ‘it seems to hurt.
Some something loves me not,
I am not loved—and where to fly
And what if not myself to be?
Is there a better I than this
Which Teacher Pain would not so pinch?’
We toss in hot self-inquisition. …
And Nurse reads on: Jack scrambles to the top.
I cannot scream ‘Don't go!’
The Little Mermaid starts to float to heaven.
‘I won't! I won't!’ My legs keep sinking.
And then I sleep. …

Lowell's poem begins with the child's rebellion against his parents in favor of the security of his grandparents' farm. He is not sick, but he is not about to give up his pre-Edenic safety any more than Riding's little girl wants Jack to “fall” or her own legs to sink (her genital development being a “sickness” in clear contrast to the Mermaid's asexual, dead body). Lowell's boy remains safely ensconced in the orderly family rose garden, not venturing out into the “scarey” virgin pines beyond:

“I won't go with you. I want to stay with
                    Grandpa!”
That's how I threw cold water
on my Mother and Father's
watery martini pipe dreams at Sunday dinner. …
Nowhere was anywhere after a summer
at my Grandfather's farm.
Diamond-pointed, athrist and Norman,
its alley of poplars
paraded from Grandmother's rose garden
to a scarey stand of virgin pine,
scrub, and paths forever pioneering.(12)

Playing on childhood memories, both poets make use of iambic rhythms and falling end rhymes to reinforce the childish tone. And both catch the reader's attention with the child's outburst. The subject of both passages is the universal childhood of fear of mortality, closely connected here to oedipal fears as well.

We can conclude, then, that Riding developed effective techniques for the autobiographical poem, techniques which Lowell and Plath also found effective some thirty years later in writing “confessional” poetry. We might also guess that Riding had some influence on their work, at the very least, in daring to expose the self autobiographically in the poem.

Notes

1. Laura Riding, “Preface,” Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 1938), p. xxvii.

2. Introduction, The Poems of Laura Riding (London: Carcanet, 1980), p. 2.

3. “Preface,” Collected Poems, p. xxvi.

4. Selected Poems: In Five Sets (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 11.

5. Anarchism is Not Enough (New York: Doubleday, 1928), p. 119.

6. Collected Poems, p. 3. This, and all subsequent quotations from Riding's poems are taken from this edition.

7. Roy Fuller, “The White Goddess,” The Review, No. 23, Sept.-Nov. 1970, p. 5.

8. Sylvia Plath, “Purdah,” Winter Trees (New York: Harper, 1972), p. 40.

9. Plath, “The Applicant,” Ariel (New York: Harper, 1965), p. 4.

10. Plath, “Death & Co.” Ariel, p. 28.

11. Robert Lowell, “Commander Lowell,” Life Studies (New York: Noonday, 1964), p. 71.

12. Lowell, “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” Life Studies, p. 59.