Although Laura (Riding) Jackson's work has been highly acclaimed by many prominent twentieth-century poets and intellectuals, she has not received the concerted critical attention she deserves.¹ While the reasons for this disregard are complex, (Riding) Jackson has decisively contributed to her own neglect.² Objecting to the ways that anthologies misrepresent poets' larger works, (Riding) Jackson routinely refused to have her work anthologized. Further, until her death in 1991, she publicly attacked even her most sympathetic critics, meticulously correcting their mistakes in lengthy critical commentary. For (Riding) Jackson, any frame of reference falsified the precise language and thought that each of her poems brought into existence, leading her to enjoin against interpretation itself.³ Yet, by her very vigilance she discouraged the development of a fuller critical response, important for her far-reaching and difficult work.

In the limited critical attention she has received, (Riding) Jackson has been labeled alternately a modernist, a New Critical, and a postmodernist poet. The multiplicity of terms suggests the problems critics have had in locating (Riding) Jackson's poetry within literary history. Yet, (Riding) Jackson's career offers one of the most singular and willful efforts of our time: to arrive at a “true” human universality through a complex intervention in signifying practices themselves. Although (Riding) Jackson is utopian, she ever seeks to realize her vision through a reworking of the very languages of her existence.⁴

Crucial to (Riding) Jackson's utopian vision of a new human universality is her gender critique. In the 1920s and 1930s at the same time that (Riding) Jackson was formulating her poetics, she arrived at a perspective on gender that bears remarkable similarities to poststructuralist critiques of the suppression of the feminine in discourse.⁵ Indeed, (Riding) Jackson came to the understanding that what went by the name of universality was actually a form of masculine domination. As she saw it, men in projecting their needs for self-importance onto women make women's difference into a mirror that reflects themselves. As the sole standard of the universal, “man” only “creates arbitrarily comprehensive notions of himself; by negating the sense of difference, by denying that which is different.” But (Riding) Jackson did not conclude from her gender critique that she should write a women's poetry. Rather, she wished to alter the entire set of gender and linguistic relations that maintained this masculine domination. If a new human universality were to be achieved, it would only come about “through the ordering of all the implications of difference” (WW, 41, 43, 87).⁶ As such, (Riding) Jackson worked to develop a poetics of “thought in its final condition of truth,” countering those holistic and mirroring relations that she saw as critical to an art of the “patriarchal leer” (P, 267).⁷

In her antiholistic and antimirroring poetics, (Riding) Jackson bears important affinities with Gertrude Stein and early Marianne Moore.⁸ Although in the twentieth century, clearly holistic and mirroring relationships have been important to both men's and women's poetry (albeit more problematically to women's poetry, I contend), these three women poets engaged in important forms of poetic innovation, which put these relations into question.⁹ Certainly a number of twentieth-century male poets have been committed to an antiholistic (or anti-illusionistic) poetry, yet, for the most part, their work remains tied in important ways to the linguistically formative use of women and additional designated “others” as mirrors.¹⁰ As such, the poetry, say, of William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens, or even Robert Creeley or John Ashbery, retains a psychological vérité that has enabled these male writers to escape the blanketing pejorative judgments historically visited upon (Riding) Jackson, Moore, and Stein for their obscure and coy language play.¹¹ But it is precisely these women poets' refusal of this technique of othering which makes their work so innovative.

In my conclusion, I will return to the larger question of (Riding) Jackson's place in literary history. First, I wish to establish the specificity of (Riding) Jackson's own poetic practice, concentrating on the relationship between her poetics and her gender critique.¹² While (Riding) Jackson is best known for her poetry, she also produced a prodigious body of prose works, including several brilliant, if uneven, treatises on gender and on poetics.¹³ Indeed, her books on poetics address many of the most prominent poetical issues of her time and provide an important alternative perspective to entrenched discussions of twentieth-century poetics. Responding negatively to T. S. Eliot's “zeitgeist” poetics, she nonetheless establishes a poetics that shares a number of tenets with New Critical poetry, but for different reasons and ends. In fact, (Riding) Jackson may well have been instrumental in the establishment of the New Criticism itself.¹⁴ Although (Riding) Jackson did not consistently link her poetics to her gender critique, they reinforce each other. Developing a poetics of the “individual-unreal” and “analysis,” in opposition to a poetics of the “individual-real” and “synthesis,” (Riding) Jackson counters those holistic and mirroring relations on which an art of the “patriarchal leer” depends (A, 41-132).

THE “REALLY NEW” POEM

(Riding) Jackson established her innovative poetry and poetics at the confluence of modernist and New Critical poetics. Her poetry first appearing in small magazines in the early 1920s, (Riding) Jackson was a “discovery” of the Fugitive poets (later the New Critical poets), publishing in their journal The Fugitive and winning in 1924 the magazine's annual prize for “the most promising poet of the year.”¹⁵ Encouraged to join the Fugitives in Louisville, (Riding) Jackson's bold and emotional presence made a poor fit with Louisville patrician society, and she lived there for only a short time. In 1926, (Riding) Jackson moved to England at the invitation of Robert Graves, who, having admired (Riding) Jackson's poetry in The Fugitive, proposed a collaborative venture.¹⁶ In England, (Riding) Jackson met, among others, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf.¹⁷ With Graves, (Riding) Jackson wrote her first of several book-length treatises on poetics, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), followed by A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928).¹⁸ At the same time, she also published two critical works of her own, Contemporaries and Snobs (1928) and Anarchism Is Not Enough (1928).

But even before meeting Graves, (Riding) Jackson had published her essay “A Prophecy and a Plea” (1925), establishing poetical principles that would serve as a defining basis for her entire career.¹⁹ In fact, several critics have speculated that (Riding) Jackson's influence was far greater on Graves than his on her during the more than a decade they lived and worked together and that she provided Graves with the psychological and ideological framework he needed to wrest his work from a genteel Georgianism.²⁰ The occasion for (Riding) Jackson's writing of “A Prophecy and a Plea” was as a rejoinder to John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, both of whom had addressed the “future of poetry” in separate editorial essays in The Fugitive.²¹ Despite differences between them, both Ransom and Tate assume a distinction between life and aesthetics, to which (Riding) Jackson objects: “For art is the way we live, while aesthetics in divorcing art from life, sets the seal of approval upon the philosophy of escape” (“PP,” 275). Further, neither Ransom nor Tate envision the poet as the powerful maker that (Riding) Jackson conceives. For (Riding) Jackson, the poet is importantly a creative maker who must not try “to force meaning out of [life],” but rather “press meaning upon it” (“PP,” 278). Indeed, (Riding) Jackson dismisses most poetry as producing a “vitiation of life in art,” since the poet has failed to “envisage life not as an influence upon the soul but the soul as an influence upon life” (“PP,” 276). One of the few poets to get a nod of approval in the essay is Shelley, who, like (Riding) Jackson, stresses how the poet is foremost a creative maker who in reordering language vitalizes human existence. But even Shelley is not sufficiently of the here and now. Moreover, in opposition to Shelley, (Riding) Jackson upholds the act of analysis over synthesis. (Riding) Jackson remarks to those who maintain that “the way of analysis is the way of destruction, I can only answer that if one is faithful enough, constant enough, the analysis will induce the synthesis. … By taking the universe apart [the poet] will have reintegrated it with his own vitality” (“PP,” 280).

In establishing ideas in “A Prophecy and a Plea” that would direct her entire career, (Riding) Jackson importantly formulates principles that counter those commitments to aesthetic wholes so important to twentieth-century poetics. By allying her poetics with “life” and not “aesthetics,” (Riding) Jackson sided with what she came to call “total actuality” rather than with an “ideal order” of literary “monuments” or other idealized wholes (WW, 12).²² (In fact, [Riding] Jackson eventually came to renounce poetry because she believed its aesthetic demands got in the way of “truth”: there was a conflict between its “creed … and its craft tying the hope [of truth] to verbal rituals” and between actual “underlying problem[s]” and its “effect of completeness” [SP, 12; “WI,” 3, 6].) Her emphasis on analysis led her to devise a decreative poetics that countered a dominant poetics in which the poem was foremost to synthesize heterogeneous materials.

One of the poets singled out in “A Prophecy and a Plea” for being insufficiently imbued with life was T. S. Eliot: “T. S. Eliot and his imitators endeavor to show how their chastity and ennui remain intact through all their orgies of intellectual debauchery” (“PP,” 279). In subsequent writings, Eliot becomes (Riding) Jackson's central target for attack. His belief in “a communal poetic mind” and in a “world-tradition of poetry” goes against (Riding) Jackson's emphasis on the singular nature of the “really new work of art.”²³ In insightful and vitupertative commentary, (Riding) Jackson repeatedly takes Eliot and his generation to task: “[This generation] invents a communal poetic mind which sits over the individual poet whenever he writes; it binds him with the necessity of writing correctly in extension of the tradition, the world-tradition of poetry; and so makes poetry internally an even narrower period activity than it is forced to be by outside influences. … Already, its most ‘correct’ writers, such as T. S. Eliot, have become classics” (SM, 264). Acknowledging poetry's reduced significance during her time, (Riding) Jackson judges Eliot's reliance on the communal mind and world-tradition as merely a compensatory reaction—a form of restriction that makes poetry even narrower than it need be. Eliot's emphasis on history is similarly problematic, leading to a “zeitgeist poetry” rather than to a poetry of “truth” and “goodness.”²⁴

(Riding) Jackson disparages Eliot for his elevation of criticism to the same level as creation. By doing so, he separates out the “‘literary’ sense” of the poem, validating it over the poet's fresh activity: “The ‘literary’ sense comes to be the authority to write which the poet is supposed to receive, through criticism, from the age that he lives in. … More and more the poet has been made to conform to literature instead of literature to the poet—literature being the name given by criticism to works inspired by or obedient to criticism.” Indeed, “Creation and critical judgment being made one act, a work has no future history with readers; it is ended when it is ended” (CS, 10, 132). From (Riding) Jackson's perspective, Eliot is attempting to exercise a kind of monopoly over the work of art, thereby depriving not only the writer, but the reader, of her own activity. Thus, Eliot's poems are “ended” when they are “ended,” having no separate life apart from his own safekeeping of them. But for (Riding) Jackson, the poet must be more than a “servant and interpreter of civilization” (CS, 134). Rather, poetry should be seen as “an ever immediate reality confirmed afresh and independently in each new work rather than as a continuously sustained tradition, confirmed personally rather than professionally” (CS, 134). (Riding) Jackson enjoins: “It is … always important to distinguish between what is historically new in poetry because the poet is contemporary with a civilization of a certain kind, and what is intrinsically new in poetry because the poet is a new and original individual” (SM, 163).

But if (Riding) Jackson viewed T. S. Eliot's emphasis on tradition and criticism in a highly negative light, she, despite her remarks about his lack of personalism, develops her own ethos of impersonalism. (Riding) Jackson condemned what she called Eliot's “shame of the person,” commenting that Eliot was too interested in the “abstract nature of poetry” and not enough in “the immediate personal workings of poetry in him” (CS, 10, 133). But (Riding) Jackson herself hardly advanced a concept of self that is anything like the social or psychological self that is usually meant by the term. Rather, for (Riding) Jackson the self was importantly an “unreal self” or an “individual-unreal.”²⁵ (Riding) Jackson, who felt that existing social orders in their normative assumptions belied the self, postulated through her concept of an “unreal self” an entity apart from these orders. Indeed, the “unreal self” is perhaps best described as the ensuing, creative willfulness of a self deliberately estranged from social orders. (Riding) Jackson writes: “In every person there is the possibility of a small, pure, new, unreal portion which is, without reference to personality, in the popular, social sense, self. I use ‘self’ in no romantic connotation if only because it is the most vivid word, I can use for this particular purification.” As (Riding) Jackson put it, the “unreal self is to me poetry” (A, 96, 99).

In establishing her ideas, (Riding) Jackson compares the “individualunreal” to a despised, “individual-real.” For (Riding) Jackson, in a literature of the “individual-real,” self “authenticates” itself in relationship to existing social orders. The writer uses “the material of the collective-real to insinuate dogmatically the individual-real” (A, 48). As (Riding) Jackson saw it, most of the literature of her time was a literature of the “individual-real.” Castigating numerous contemporaries, (Riding) Jackson singles out Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse as “a perfect example of the individual-real”:

it is individual: not in the sense that it is personal, warm, alive to itself, indifferent to effect or appreciation, vividly unreal, but in the sense that it individualizes. … To do this, language must be strained, supersensitized, loaded with comparisons, suggestive images, emotional analogies; used, that is, in a poetic way to write something that is not poetry. … In works like this neither the author who is obsessed by the necessity of emphasizing the individual-real, nor the reader, who is forced to follow the author painfully (word for word) in this obsession may do as he pleases.

(A, 46-47)

In authenticating self through the “collective real,” Woolf endlessly finessed language without addressing the self's “unreality.” Eliot proved “how individually realistic the childish, mass-magicked real stuff can be if sufficiently documented” (A, 70). Indeed, an art of the “individual real” despite its emphasis on “particulars” was compelled by “the nostalgic desire to reconstitute an illusory whole that has no integrity but the integrity of accident” (A, 104). Such an art was hopelessly “synthetic”: “imitative, communicative, provocative of association.” In contrast a poetry of the “individual-unreal” was “analytic”: “original, dissociative, and provocative of dissociation” (A, 115).

The problem with Woolf, Eliot, and others like them were that they took existing social orders seriously. The best way to deal with society was to take it impersonally, not as a means to self-discovery:

To attempt to discover and form personality in the social pattern is to make social life dull, vulgar, and aggressive, and life with self, dull, morbid, and trivial. To treat social life as an impersonal pattern is to give it the theatrical vitality of humor and to make life with self strong and serious. The social problem is for each individual how to read the proper degree of humorous formality in his communicative language, his clothes, his home; not how to acquire a vicarious personal life which has no content but a gross synthetic personality-desire.

(A, 119)

Alienated both from a genteel, bourgeois way of life as well as from socialistic politics, (Riding) Jackson urged that social orders themselves be seen as arbitrary. Language, clothes, and home thus could become a means for humorous commentary.

Indeed, for (Riding) Jackson, the poem itself as the product of an “unreal self” is the “result of an ability to create a vacuum in experience.” Correspondingly a poem consists of “generalizations that mean something without instances, that are unreal since they mean something by themselves” (A, 17, 83). In one of her most provocative descriptions of poetry, (Riding) Jackson comments: “There is a sense of life so real that it becomes the sense of something more real than life. … It introduces a principle of selection into the undifferentiating quantitative appetite and thus changes accidental emotional forms into deliberate intellectual forms. … It is the meaning at work in what has no meaning; it is, at its clearest, poetry” (CS, 9). For (Riding) Jackson, poetry is intensely motivated—by “a sense of life … more real than life.” (Here “real” is used in an entirely positive way.) Importantly, this “sense of life” intuited by an “unreal self” cannot be questioned by any frame of reference outside herself. Through the “unreal self's” selectivity, “accidental emotional forms” tied to “the undifferentiating quantitative appetite” can be transformed into “deliberate intellectual forms.”

Indeed, what makes a poem a poem is the new linguistic relationships it brings into being through its self-referential relations: “the way [a poem] corresponds in every respect with its own governing meaning … [is] the necessity of the poem to be written” (SM, 133). In such an autonomous and unparaphrasable poem, the poet is saying exactly what she means: “its final form is identical in terms with its preliminary form in the poet's mind” (SM, 142). To paraphrase a poem is to fail to attend to the specificity of its thought: its necessity to be written. Such poems might be condemned by inadequate readers as both “didactic” and “obscure” (as many of [Riding] Jackson's poems have), but there is no help for it (SM, 138-39). The poem only exists in its exact wording, not in its paraphrase.

The emphasis on the autonomy and the unparaphrasableness of the poem are, of course, hallmarks of the New Criticism. Although Eliot himself asserted the autonomy of the poem and the unparaphrasableness of his own “objective correlative,” these tenets were not for him the raison d'être they became for the New Critics, or for (Riding) Jackson.²⁶ Yet, in (Riding) Jackson's case, the principles of the poem's autonomy and unparaphrasableness are in service of a very different kind of poetry than for the New Critics. For (Riding) Jackson, a poem is autonomous and unparaphrasable because as a product of an “unreal self” it brings new linguistic relations into existence. While the “unreal self” must be situated in “entirety”—“to be not merely somewhere but precisely somewhere in precisely everywhere”—the “unreal self” importantly brings her “new, unreal portion” to the making of the poem, dislocating preexisting meanings (P, 409), (Riding) Jackson describes this process:

The end of poetry is to leave everything as pure and bare as possible after its operation. It is therefore important that its tools of destruction should be as frugal, economical as possible. When the destruction or analysis is accomplished they shall have to account for their necessity; they are the survivors, the result as well as the means of elimination. … The greater the clutter attacked and the smaller, the purer, the residue to which it is reduced (the more destructive the tools), the better the poem.

(A, 117)

For (Riding) Jackson, a poem is successful to the extent that its decreative practices establish a language voided of unwanted connotations, such that the writer could mean what she wished to mean.

In contrast, for the New Critics, the autonomy of the poem was linked to preexisting wholes: to larger literary, mythical, and ontological orders of which the poem was exemplary. Indeed, the New Critics frequently resorted to a rhetoric of organicism, emphasizing the poem's holistic relationship to holistic entities. Moreover, a poem was unparaphrasable not because of the spareness of its denoted thought but because of the complexity of its connotative meanings. For the New Critics the poem was importantly a synthetic entity that brought heterogeneous elements into harmonious relationships; but for (Riding) Jackson it was a set of analytic relations that altered existing meanings through decreative techniques. As (Riding) Jackson saw it, a false autonomy, or absoluteness, was often claimed for poems that did not in fact possess it. In fact, there was no such thing as absolute autonomy; different poems possessed autonomy in varying degrees depending on the rigorousness of their decreative operations. (Riding) Jackson noted that many poets asserted an “authority” for their poems that “the poet is unable to find in life.” Only those poems that established their “irrefutability” on the basis of their new linguistic relations could claim to be unparaphrasable and autonomous (CS, 38).

For both the New Critics and (Riding) Jackson, paradoxes constitute an important poetic relation. But for the New Critics, their paradoxes were to achieve a balanced equilibrium through the ultimately harmonious relations poems brought into being. For (Riding) Jackson, paradoxes were often irresolvable contradictions, attesting to the irreducible disparities between diverse entities (SM, 154). Meaning itself was highly problematical, best intimated through definitions based on negations and through sense eclipsed by the materiality of signification.

In (Riding) Jackson's “The World and I,” the speaker meditates on how she is unable to state “exactly” what she means.²⁷ While the poem bears a likeness to the “metaphysical poems” Eliot and the New Critics admired, if not always to their poems themselves, its paradoxes work to demarcate disparate and unreconcilable relationships. The poem begins:

This is not exactly what I mean
Any more than the sun is the sun.
But how to mean more closely
If the sun shines but approximately?
What a world of awkwardness!
What hostile implements of sense!

(P, 187)

By beginning with an entirely open and vague, “This is not exactly what I mean,” (Riding) Jackson calls attention to her desire and frustration to make meaning. Contrasting this statement with the seeming least problematical kind of meaning statement, “the sun is the sun,” (Riding) Jackson discloses the vast spaces between the kinds of meanings she can make. Further, the “sun shines but approximately,” since an unbridgable chasm separates language and physical phenomena and since not even the gaseous ball we call the sun is coincidental with itself from moment to moment. Having explored the dimensions of the meanings she cannot command, the speaker then questions her own demand for exact meanings:

Perhaps this is as close a meaning
As perhaps becomes such knowing.
Else I think the world and I
Must live together as strangers and die—
A sour love, each doubtful whether
Was ever a thing to love the other.
No, better for both to be nearly sure
Each of each—exactly where
Exactly I and exactly the world
Fail to meet by a moment, and a word.

(P, 187)

The deliberately vague “this is as close a meaning” suggests that the conditions of knowing may themselves be inexact; and, therefore, a demand for exact meaning can only lead to inexact meanings. In fact, this demand can only result in a “sour love,” that belies the need for love between the “world and I.” Better, then, to acknowledge how “where / Exactly I and exactly the world / Fail to meet by a moment, and a word.” Rather than lose the world or herself, the speaker considers their very lack of correlation best bespeaks such disparate entities as “I,” “world,” “a moment,” and “a word.” So exact is the inexactness between these entities as explored by the poem that it can only be intimated, not stated. The difference between (Riding) Jackson's poetic predilections and Ransom's “miraculism” could not be more pronounced. For Ransom, “miraculism arises when the poet discovers by analogy an identity between objects which is partial, though it should be considerable, and proceeds to an identification which it is complete.”²⁸

In her “Disclaimer of the Person,” (Riding) Jackson explores the irresolvable contradiction between the immaterial and material makeup of meanings. The speaker meditates on herself at once as constituting and constituted by her meanings and as apart from and caught up in her writing as a material production. The poem concludes:

If I my words am,
If the footed head with frowns them
And the handed heart which smiles them
Are the very writing, table, chair,
The paper, pen, self, taut community
Wherein enigma's orb is word-constrained.
Does myself upon the page meet,
Does the thronging firm a name
To nod my own—witnessing
I write or am this, it is written?
What thinks the world?
Has here the time-eclipsed occasion
Grown language-present?
Or does the world demand,
And what think I?
The world in me which fleet to disavow
Ordains perpetual reiteration?
And these the words ensuing.

(P, 235-36)

By turning her statements into questions, the speaker establishes herself as both implicated in and outside of the complex relations set into play by the questions themselves. Thus, while the opposites posed in the questions strongly suggest the ways that the speaker is constituted through her act of material signification, the voice works as a kind of an “unreal self” questioning this constitution. The speaker by her “footed head” and her “handed heart” calls up not only her physical body, but the look of letters on the page. These serifed and linked letters have the look of truncated bodies, as the speaker's own body is foreshortened by the words of her poem. But the speaker is not only caught up by the materiality of her words, but by her very means of production: “the very writing, table, chair / The paper, pen, self, taut community.” In this “thronging” on the page, the speaker senses herself as either “I write or am this, it is written.” Writer and written are merely flip sides of the same poem, as are “What thinks the world” and “What think I.” The world has “Grown language-present” and the “The world in me … / Ordains perpetual reiteration.” Yet, while the poem seems almost a demonstration of the materiality of signification, the questioning voice provides a separate reality: asking if this “thronging” “firms” “a name / To nod my own.”

In an age of science and specialization, (Riding) Jackson shared with Eliot and the New Critics the attempt to formulate a poetry that would have legitimacy as an important form of knowledge. But whereas Eliot and the New Critics sought to secure poetry's importance by asserting a separate realm for it, (Riding) Jackson eschewed what she saw as a professionalization and aestheticization of art. She thought that in an age devoted to specialization, poetry, like any other sphere of human activity, should feel compelled to examine itself, ironically commenting: “A professional conscience dawns on the poet; as when the prestige of any organization is curtailed—of the army, or the navy, for example—a greater internal discipline, a stricter morality and a more careful evaluation of tactics result” (CS, 128). From (Riding) Jackson's point of view, Eliot and the New Critics were trying to bolster poetry rather than to examine it. While they asserted poetry's autonomy, they contradictorily attempted to make poetry more relevant to its time by increasing its range, cluttering up their poems with “contemporary data,” learned allusions, and connotations run awry. (Riding) Jackson thought that what the age needed was for poetry to become more itself: “thought in its final condition of truth,” urging a poetry in which an “unreal self” “by taking the universe apart will have reintegrated it” with her own “vitality.”

STRANGERS IN THE COUNTRY OF MEN

At the same time that (Riding) Jackson was establishing her poetics, she was also forming her gender critique. (Riding) Jackson came to see the uses to which women had been put in civilized society as critical to the social orders she despised. Concentrating on the word “woman” as a linguistic function, she arrived at a perspective on gender that possesses remarkable similarities to poststructuralist critiques of the suppression of the feminine in discourse. But while (Riding) Jackson developed this feminist perspective, she was not interested in writing a specifically women's poetry. Rather, she wished to alter the entire set of gender relations in order to arrive at a new human universality. Formulating in her critique the ways that women have served as a central prop for the “solemn masculine machine,” she in her poetry elects to alter the machine itself (A, 196). That is, in rejecting those holistic and synthetic relationships that define Eliot's and the New Critics' poetics and in insisting on her own decreative and analytic techniques, (Riding) Jackson works against existing linguistic orders. Further, she disengages from those mirroring relationships that directly underwrite an art of the “patriarchal leer.”

As early as her essay “Jocasta” in Anarchism Is Not Enough, (Riding) Jackson evinces her poetics as a corrective to prevailing sexual economies. Formulating in this essay her important distinction between a literature of “an individual-unreal” and of “an individual-real,” she dismisses a literature of the hated “individual-real” as a “nostalgic, lascivious, masculine, Oedipean embrace of the real mother-body by the unreal-son mind” (A, 70). The “unreal” son's mind, rather than inquiring into itself, uses the mother's body to produce a lascivious and nostalgic literature. By entitling the lengthy essay “Jocasta,” (Riding) Jackson signals that this incestuous state is pervasive—and that, at least in this essay, Jocasta herself is its avenging subject.

In a more extensive critique of gender in the same volume, in “The Damned Thing,” (Riding) Jackson analyzes the production of sexuality within civilization, dismissing literary sensibilities as deeply implicated in such a production. As she saw it, men's “phallus-proud-works-of-art” amount to little more than men's “private play with [women] in public” (A, 205, 208). Indeed, sexuality itself has been vastly overwritten by a civilization uncomfortable with it. The kingpin of this system is women's “impersonal sexuality” that “if not philosophized would wreck the solemn masculine machine” (A, 196). In its civilized version, sexuality is produced as a kind of rare brew of bodily impulses, scientific phrases and literary sentiments, which all conspire to keep women in a passive state. (Riding) Jackson discloses just what “this diffusion which modern society calls love” consists of by revealing what a man's “I love you” speech means:

“My sexual glands by the growing enlargement of my sex instinct since childhood and its insidious, civilized traffic with each part of my mental and physical being, are unfortunately in a state of continual excitement. I have very good control of myself, but my awareness of your sexual physique and its radiations was so acute that I could not resist the temptation to desire to lie with you. Please do not think this ignoble of me, for I shall perform this act, if you permit it, with the greatest respect and tenderness and attempt to make up for the indignity it of course fundamentally will be to you (however pleasurable) by serving you in every possible way and by sexually flattering manifestations of your personality which are not strictly sexual.”

(A, 189)

(Riding) Jackson well reveals the unsavoriness of a speech that pretends to nobility when it is so perversely construed. Importantly her ultimate target of attack is neither men nor sexuality, but the ways sexual desire has been produced through an “insidious, civilized traffic”: “The social mechanism for disposing of sex makes sex as large and complicated as itself, intensifies its masculinity. Its femininity reduces merely to an abstract passive principle of motion in the great moving masculine machine” (A, 195). As (Riding) Jackson saw it, feminine passivity was actively maintained by masculine domination.

But by far Riding's most sustained and trenchant gender critique is The Word “Woman,” written in 1933 to 1935, but only recently published. In a recent introduction (Riding) Jackson directly links this critique to a corrective vision of literature: “I believe that a close reading of the text of The Word “Woman” may strip literature of its mythologies of ludicrous pieties.” As one example of such “ludicrous pieties,” (Riding) Jackson singles out “the hypocrisies of the Graves order of upper-notch Anglo-Saxon romanticism” (WW, 13). Throughout their relationship, (Riding) Jackson served as a harsh critic of Graves's work, but after her break with Graves she took to denouncing his work in often scathing public attacks. Appalled by Randall Jarrell's suggestion, among others, that she herself was the model for Graves's The White Goddess, she denounced Graves's text as a “spectacular show of poet-piety,” of “nothingish spiritualistics,” written by a “self-crowned genius of poetic masculinity” (WW, 208, 211).²⁹ (Riding) Jackson found Graves's text repugnant because of what she perceived as a misuse of her own ideas and person. Graves's “white goddess” upheld the old masculine orders; her new woman was to decisively alter them.

In The Word “Woman,” (Riding) Jackson arrives at a perspective on women that is uncannily similar to the poststructuralist critique of the suppression of the feminine in discourse, as theorized by Luce Irigaray. As Luce Irigaray most succinctly describes this “specular discourse”: women are “the projective map” that “guarantees the system.”³⁰ While (Riding) Jackson and Irigaray's theories can be criticized for their totalizing aspects, they have direct and relevant application to lyric poetry. One of the pervasive conventions of twentieth-century poetry is that the speaker constitutes his authority through the mirroring others of his poem. Yet, for women, as the “projective map” that “guarantees the system,” such mirroring relations are problematical. Indeed, women simply cannot use men in the same way as men use women to establish their authoritative stances. Further, (Riding) Jackson and Irigaray urge that women's “self”-expression is troubled by the uses to which women have been put.

(Riding) Jackson begins The Word “Woman” by analyzing the ways the word “woman” has been used in multiple cultures and times, concluding that “women are strangers in the country of men” (WW, 19). The reason for this state of affairs is that man, in projecting his need for his own self-importance onto women, has made women's difference into a mirror by which to reflect himself: “Man, in his growing self-importance, reads differences as negativeness—namely the absence of, or deficiency in, male characteristics. Women become more and more a foil to male positiveness” (WW, 87). Since men have denied women their own reality, (Riding) Jackson dismisses their concepts of the universal as reflective only of men: “We cannot avail ourselves of man's universalizations because when he uses himself as the standard … he only creates arbitrarily comprehensive notions of himself; by negating the sense of difference, by denying that which is different” (WW, 41). For (Riding) Jackson as for Irigaray, women's position as other, as foil, can't be easily turned around because most of language, most of history, reflects this male appropriation. In (Riding) Jackson's terms, women are sleepwalkers in an order that does not reflect them; indeed, they are only just awakening.

So total is the stronghold of this masculine appropriation that women must engage in subversive forms of behavior, if they are to break the sexist culture's codes. As Irigaray encourages women to mimic femininity—to reveal their difference from its projections—(Riding) Jackson encourages women to meddle with their mask, their maskeup: “The mask is woman's trade mark. And at this stage [of history] she does well to brand her actions as womanly until man sees the necessitous relation between her action and her physical difference from him: until the impression ‘different action’ is identical with the impression ‘different appearance’” (WW, 120). By emphasizing the activity they put into making themselves up, women can disrupt men's equation of their appearance with passivity, establishing themselves as different than they are projected to be within a masculine economy (WW, 119-22).

However, for (Riding) Jackson, unlike Irigaray, the establishment of women's difference is only the means to a greater end: the realization of a new human universality not based on women's exclusion. Positioned outside existing social orders, women have an important historical role to perform as agents of change. Women, unlike men, do not need to establish their identity through their sexual difference—and therefore do not need to make it the be-all and end-all of their existence. They can help bring about a new human universality precisely because they are able to acknowledge that life is a “composite.” Indeed, if a new unity is to be realized, it will only be “through the ordering of all the implications of difference” (WW, 42-43).

Throughout her poetry (Riding) Jackson struggles to realize a new human universality, based on changed gender relationships. In one of (Riding) Jackson's relatively early poems “Life-Size Is Too Large,” the speaker contemplates how she can't see herself in a life-size mirror. But rather than concluding, as does Irigaray, that she should inscribe a fluid and contradictory writing, (Riding) Jackson opts (at least in her poetry) for an incremental, if also contradictory, thought. The poem begins with the seeming paradox that if the speaker is to see herself, she can only see herself in “microscopy,” if she is “To have room to think at all.” For when she commands the “‘Cramped mirror, faithful constriction, / Break, be as large as I,’” she loses herself to desolation:

Then I heard little leaves in my ears rustling
And a little wind like a leaf blowing
My mind into a corner of my mind,
Where wind over empty ground went blowing
And a large dwarf picked and picked up nothing,

(P, 86)

Through the “microscopy” that the “cramped mirror” provides her, the speaker can think with a sense of repleteness, but as soon as the compass expands into a large, life-size mirror, she is wracked with absence—with abjection.

In “The Biography of a Myth,” (Riding) Jackson traces the evolution of a myth—of a woman who begins by “delivering beauty / like a three hour entertainment” (P, 179). As an “other” that is leered at, she can bring no good to others or herself:

Then they went home, grinning at otherness,
And she to lour in shame, out of which night
She rose unseen, absent in counted presence. …

(P, 179)

Importantly only as an absence can this woman begin to realize herself. Suffering from exposure, she turns inward, whispering to herself:

                              “She whom they did not see though saw
Myself now am, hidden all away in her
Inward from her confiding mouth and face
To deep discretion, this other-person mind.”

(P, 179)

Away from her “confiding mouth,” she can only turn to “deep discretion” and to “this other-person mind.” And although “In this pale state she had prediction of self,” there can be no beyond, since the world does not yet exist, “Where she the world, and he inhabiting / Like peace unto himself” (P, 179, 180). The woman exists as a kind of truth onto herself, “So long she is no measured, proven seeming” (P, 180). But present to the world, she can only produce the conditions of false belief:

                    [She] gave them back
Their faith, a legal gospel like false oaths
Adhered to with the loyalty of words
That do not pledge the mind to believe itself.

(P, 180)

The female figure as source is most efficacious as an absent, inward-turning “unreal self,” existing apart from the compromised orders of the world.

In “The Need to Confide” the speaker tells of her need to relate to an “other:”

My need to confide,
My friend man,
Is not my mouth's way of stealth
Nor my heart's need of nakedness.
It is my need for myself, man,
To be talking with it—

(P, 265)

(Riding) Jackson deliberately abstracts the word “confidence” from its connotations of secretive self-revelation. Her use of the word “man” is both deliberately gender-specific and universal: for her need to confide can only happen through existing languages. And while she is compelled by the ideal of universality that the word “man” can suggest, she also realizes its limited, gender bias. Rather than blurring these two senses of “man,” (Riding) Jackson's poem articulates them through her disjunctive address: “It is my need for myself, man.” The kind of unavailable confidence she is attempting to experience is expressed jarringly as an “it”—so much does she need “it” and so little does “it” resemble what is typically meant by the word “confidence.” While “man's” words remain with “love-meant” not with “love could,” her desire to be “day-same,” a “flushed double dark,” can only “join to itself” (P, 266).

While these poems address the problematics of meaning within meaning systems in which woman as an “other” is compromised and muted, they also directly counter existing poetic modes. That is, by refusing those forms by which poetic meaning and closure are achieved—holistic and mirroring relationships—they eloquently bespeak women's dilemmas. While this eloquence necessarily brings with it the indirection and silence that characterize (Riding) Jackson's poetry, for (Riding) Jackson women can most mean when they are obliquely “talking with it.” And only when women are “talking with it,” actualizing their “unreal selves” within the existing problematics of language, can a new human universality emerge.

In conclusion, I wish to consider the larger question of (Riding) Jackson's place in literary history. Within existing periodizing concepts, (Riding) Jackson's poetry can only be seen as a strange kind of amalgam of modernist, New Critical, and postmodernist poetics. Indeed, (Riding) Jackson has been labeled alternately and in combination by each of these terms. Yet, given the willful singularity of her work, such confusion seems highly inadequate. Further, (Riding) Jackson's work points to limitations of each of these poetics. That is, (Riding) Jackson's understanding of language as the very subject of her poetry compels notice of how many modernist poets use language in far more naturalized ways. Her emphasis on such New Critical tenets as the autonomy and unparaphrasableness of the text to write a poetry that discloses irresolvable contradictions and the materiality of signification reveals how these tenets can be put to very different ends. And, (Riding) Jackson's willful agency, her concept of the “unreal self,” points to the inadequacy of much postmodernist poetics to formulate any sense of human agency or will. Indeed, her poetry underlines the ways that such periodizing concepts as modernism, New Criticism, and postmodernism do not articulate a culminating aesthetic, but are highly reified, highlighting the poetics of some poets over others.

Moreover (Riding) Jackson's example should well demonstrate how gender must be made prominent in any history of poetic innovation. The persistence of the use of periodizing concepts, especially in discussions of poetics apart from considerations of race, class, and gender, ultimately validates those very selected texts on which their definitions are based. While it might seem that these days poets are only poorly served by the term New Critical, the category makes recognizable, and therefore legitimates, a certain body of poets and poetry, making way for their reiteration and comeback.³¹ Indeed, not to consider (Riding) Jackson's poetics of an “individual-unreal” and “analysis” with respect to gender is to fail to establish a sense of sufficient motivation for her difficult poetry. Further, it is to disregard the kind of innovation she needed to engage in order to write her “universal” poetry.

As I commented at the beginning of this chapter, a more suggestive context for (Riding) Jackson's poetry than existing periodizing concepts is the poetics of early Moore and of Stein. Stein, in fact, was one of the few poets (Riding) Jackson publicly praised during her lifetime. All three women poets in disengaging from those holistic and mirroring relations crucial to an art of the “patriarchal leer” engage in important forms of poetic innovation that subvert existing gender relations. In their rejection of holistic and mirroring relations, these poets explore meanings apart from a far more simply communicative poetics of the “individual real” and its recognizable psychology. Yet literary history provides no convenient term that legitimates their antiholistic and antimirroring poetics. That Moore and Stein as well as (Riding) Jackson are frequently labeled modernist-postmodernists provides only further evidence of the ways that literary history has been unable to articulate their important poetic projects.³² Ironically, while all three writers at times take on stances of universality problematical to a postmodernist ethos, it may be their very presumption of universality that leads them to the kind of deconstructive or decreative poetics that has caused critics to add the term postmodernism to their modernism.

Surely (Riding) Jackson's poetry is not entirely outside of those mirroring and holistic relations she works against, as ultimately even deconstructed or decreated meanings are at least partially dependent on these relations. In fact, (Riding) Jackson's eventual renunciation of poetry carries through the logic of her poetics, as she came to reject all poetry for the ways its “effect of completeness” obscured actual “underlying problems.”³³ (Riding) Jackson is an important twentieth-century poet because her far-reaching commitment to change those holistic and mirroring relations on which a poetry of the “patriarchal leer” depends. The range and depth of her inquiry into meaning, including the meaning of poetic form itself, constitutes a major contribution to poetic history.

Notes

1. I have followed the example of the poet in referring to her as Laura (Riding) Jackson. In her later years, (Riding) Jackson elected to use her married name, even in republication of work written under the name of Laura Riding.

2. W. H. Auden, John Ashbery, and Robert Graves accorded (Riding) Jackson's writing major significance. W. H. Auden, declaring (Riding) Jackson “our only living philosophical poet,” paid (Riding) Jackson the tribute of copying her diction. (Riding) Jackson, who saw philosophy as a far more limited practice than poetry, failed to appreciate Auden's compliment, and she and Graves accused Auden of poetic theft. See Joyce Piell Wexler, Laura Riding's Pursuit of Truth (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979), 48, and Deborah Baker, In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 187, 323, 349-50. John Ashbery recently gave his Norton Lecture at Harvard on (Riding) Jackson. As late as 1966, an estranged Robert Graves yet fully credited (Riding) Jackson's poetic endeavors, commenting that she “can be seen now as the most original poet of the Twenties and Thirties.” Wexler, Pursuit of Truth, 143, is citing Graves's “Comments on James Jensen's ‘The Construction of Seven Types of Ambiguity,’” Modern Language Quarterly (September 1966): 256. More recently the critic Jerome McGann has summarized (Riding) Jackson's career: “Her writing executes a standard of self-examination so deep and resolute that it cannot be decently evaded. Later writers who have not at least attempted to meet its challenge risk being seen—not least of all by themselves—as trivial, attendant lords and ladies” (Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993], 134). McGann may have taken his lead from the poet Charles Bernstein who refers to (Riding) Jackson in several instances in his Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1984). See especially, pp. 340-42. Jane Marcus comments that “Riding ought to be restored to the ranks of writers like Hart Crane and Gertrude Stein, where she belongs as a shaper of our speech, a poet of powerful and original irony.” See her “Laura Riding Roughshod,” Iowa Review 12 (1981): 298. Yet despite this high acclaim only two book-length critical studies of (Riding) Jackson's work exist: Wexler, Laura Riding's Pursuit of Truth and Barbara Adams, The Enemy Self: Poetry and Criticism of Laura Riding (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1990).

3. For provocative essays on (Riding) Jackson's decanonization of herself that address many of these issues, see Jo-Ann Wallace, “Laura Riding and the Politics of Decanonization,” American Literature 64, no. 1 (March 1992): 111-26, and K. K. Ruthven, “How to Avoid Being Canonized: Laura Riding,” Textual Practice 5, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 242-60. As Wallace points out, (Riding) Jackson rejected both feminist and deconstructivist interpretive frameworks. (Riding) Jackson's negative remarks about feminism need to be considered in context. (Riding) Jackson dismissed virtually all twentieth-century political and intellectual movements as falling short of her own vision. Further, (Riding) Jackson issued several negative comments on feminism in the 1960s and 1970s because of what she perceived as its exclusive focus on a social realm defined by men. Dismissing a feminism that she perceived as too much preoccupied with women's rights in a social realm that ill suits them, she called for a redefinition of “woman,” for a new order based on “an adequate idea” of woman (WW, 197).

4. Wexler, Pursuit of Truth, stresses (Riding) Jackson's “insistence on the value of the universal and immutable” (4). By pairing the “universal” and the “immutable,” Wexler fails to convey how (Riding) Jackson's belief in “truth” and “goodness” was as a utopian possibility. Jerome McGann stresses the ways that (Riding) Jackson was a poet of interactive language: “The poem is not allowed to point toward any truth beyond its own interactive features, its own textuality.” While McGann brings an important corrective perspective to (Riding) Jackson, his failure to address her simultaneous commitment to a universal “truth” and “goodness” dehistoricizes her effort. See his Black Riders, 133. Recent criticism, of course, has noted the ways that universalizing stances have been instrumental in silencing diversity. Yet, universality has been a value of many twentieth-century writers, including many writers who address oppression. Rather than ignoring or repressing this problematic commitment, it would seem that contemporary criticism would have much to gain by exploring how the ideal of “universality” functions in diverse writers and texts. (Riding) Jackson may use the term “human unity” more frequently than “human universality,” perhaps in order to avoid the false claims of a masculinized universal and also to emphasize the composite nature of unity. I use the term “universal” to link her poetics with Enlightenment ideals of which it surely partakes.

5. This critique is crucial to the many books written by Luce Irigaray and by Hélène Cixous, among other French feminists. For a discussion of this critique in men's poststructuralist writing, see Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).

6. Quotations from (Riding) Jackson's works are cited in the text with the abbreviations listed below.

   A: Anarchism Is Not Enough (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1928).

   CS: Contemporaries and Snobs (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1928).

   P: The Poems of Laura Riding: A New Edition of the 1938 Collection (New York: Persea, 1980).

   “PP”: “A Prophecy and a Plea,” First Awakenings: The Early Poems of Laura Riding (New York: Persea, 1992).

   SM: A Survey of Modernist Poetry, with Robert Graves (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1928).

   SP: Selected Poems: In Five Sets (New York: Persea, 1993).

   “WI”: “What, If Not a Poem, Poems?” Denver Quarterly 9, no. 2 (1974): 1-13.

   WW: The Word “Woman” and Other Related Writings, ed. Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark (New York: Persea, 1993).

7. Gary Lenhart quotes, but does not cite, (Riding) Jackson's useful phrase “thought in its final condition of truth.” See his “Combat and the Erotic,” American Book Review 15, no. 4 (October-November 1993): 1.

8. In Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), I argue that Moore's early poetry is feminist precisely because of her rejection of the use of others as mirrors. See especially chapter 1, “An Artist in Refusing,” 17-29. Several critics discuss the antipatriarchal commitments of Stein's writing, although not exactly in these terms. See, for example, Marianne DeKoven, A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), and Ellen Berry, Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein's Postmodernism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).

9. Romantic and post-Romantic poetry are particularly dependent on mirroring relations between an “I” and a “you” or an “I” and an “other.” Indeed, I would suggest that an informing convention in the production and reception of poetry up to and including our time, when it is not overtly symbolic, is a mirroring aesthetic—a sense that the speaker is reflected in some unique ways by the poem's representation of that which is outside of or other than the speaker. While certainly most women poets practice some version of this convention, it is a convention made problematical for a woman by her own prominent figuring as the other. I develop this argument at greater length in conjunction with a discussion of Luce Irigaray's theories in Omissions Are Not Accidents, 21-27.

10. For a discussion of this dynamic, see Rachel DuPlessis, “Pater-Daughter: Male Modernists and Female Readers,” in The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (New York: Routledge, 1990), 41-67; Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme, in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982): 95-110; and Heuving, Omissions Are Not Accidents, 30-48.

11. I am assuming that the reader will be aware of how women and other “others” serve as projective foils in Williams, Stevens, and Creeley's poems. Although this representational convention is far less evident in Ashbery, he utilizes its dynamics and psychology in many of his poems, including his important “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.”

12. Although (Riding) Jackson's feminist orientations have been noted by several critics, very little feminist criticism has been written. Only two articles, to my knowledge, discuss (Riding) Jackson's poetry at any length with respect to her gender: Susan Schultz, “Laura Riding's Essentialism and the Absent Muse,” Arizona Quarterly 48, no. 1 (April 1992): 1-24, and Peter Temes, “Code of Silence: Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Refusal to Speak,” PMLA 109, no. 1 (January 1994): 87-99. Although Schultz's article raises provocative questions, she wrongly dismisses (Riding) Jackson as essentialist. Temes explores how in order “to escape from the role of object, of the seen and the judged,” (Riding) Jackson elected silence, within her poetry and in her renunciation of poetry (87). Temes stresses (Riding) Jackson's need for self-protection and control within an androcentric culture that will only misread and misuse her words. While I find many of his observations compatible with my own, I emphasize (Riding) Jackson's utopianism, rather than her defensiveness.

13. The prodigiousness, scope, and diversity of (Riding) Jackson's prose writings are little known. In the first part of her life, she published an impressive number of fictional, critical, and cross-genre works. For a description of (Riding) Jackson's many unknown works, see Joyce Piell Wexler's excellent bibliography: Laura Riding: A Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981), 39. (Riding) Jackson published only one book after 1940 until her death in 1991, her prose work The Telling (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).

14. (Riding) Jackson's instrumentality in the formation of the New Criticism may have occurred in two ways. (Riding) Jackson claims to have influenced the Fugitive poets' practice of close reading in the 1920s. While there is debate around who influenced whom, (Riding) Jackson was trained in close reading at an early age, urged on by her Marxist father to read newspapers with an eye for the capitalist subtext (Baker, In Extremis, 28). If (Riding) Jackson is right, a curious footnote to literary history would be the leftist derivation of a practice of reading that enabled the politically conservative New Criticism. Secondly, William Empsom credited Robert Graves's and (Riding) Jackson's ideas in A Survey of Modernist Poetry (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1928) for inspiring his Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: London, Chatto, and Windus, 1947), which, in turn, has been seen as a catalyst to the New Criticism. See Wexler, Pursuit of Truth, 14-16; James Jensen, “The Construction of Seven Types of Ambiguity,” Modern Language Quarterly 27, no. 3 (September 1966): 243-59 and (Riding) Jackson, “Some Autobiographical Corrections of Literary History,” Denver Quarterly 8, no. 4 (Winter 1974): 1-33.

15. Adams, The Enemy Self, 7.

16. Baker, In Extremis, 14-16; 86.

17. Adams, The Enemy Self, 12. (Riding) Jackson's first book of poems, The Close Chaplet, was published in 1926 by Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press.

18. A Survey of Modernist Poetry was published first in Britain in 1927 by William Heinemann publishers and later in America in 1928 by Doubleday, Doran and Company.

19. “A Prophecy and a Plea” first appeared in The Reviewer 5, no. 2 (April 1925): 1-7.

20. Adams, The Enemy Self, 12, 15. Wexler, Pursuit of Truth, 142.

21. John Crowe Ransom, “The Future of Poetry,” The Fugitive 3, no. 1 (March 1922): 2, 3. Allen Tate, “One Escape from the Dilemma,” The Fugitive 3, no. 2 (April 1924): 34-36.

22. T. S. Eliot comments how in literature “existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves.” See Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1975), 38.

23. The “really new work of art” is T. S. Eliot's phrase, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, 38.

24. (Riding) Jackson uses the word “zeitgeist” throughout her writings to disparage Eliot's poetry. (Riding) Jackson frequently criticizes the modern division between aesthetics and morality. See, for instance, Contemporaries and Snobs, 91.

25. Many critics note (Riding) Jackson's concentration on the self, but overpsychologize it. Barbara Adams stresses (Riding) Jackson's “enemy self,” establishing a dichotomy between (Riding) Jackson's presumably “real” and “ideal” selves (The Enemy Self). M. L. Rosenthal alludes to (Riding) Jackson's “egocentric stress on identity.” See his “Laura Riding's Poetry: A Nice Problem,” The Southern Review 21, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 92.

26. (Riding) Jackson, of course, saw Eliot's “zeitgeist” poetry as very different from her own self-referential poetry. Patricia Waugh emphasizes Eliot's “expressive” and “situated” poetics in contrast to the New Critics. See her Practicing Postmodernism/Reading Modernism (London: Edward Arnold, 1992): 138-47. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), analyzes the differences between Eliot and the New Critics: Eliot attempted “to refind in literary tradition the ground of a total culture, inclusive of belief … in the case of the New Critics, the social inhibition that disallows literary culture from making doctrinal claims of the ‘orthodox’ sort drives these claims back into the refuge of literary form” (154-55).

27. By failing to consider (Riding) Jackson's manifold questions about meaning itself, Adams and Wexler emphasize (Riding) Jackson's dualism in “The World and I.” For Adams, the poem “explores the relationship between language and objective reality” (The Enemy Self, 110), and for Wexler, “the gap between [(Riding) Jackson's] consciousness and her ability to articulate it is widened by the ‘hostile implements of sense’” (Pursuit of Truth, 64).

28. John Crowe Ransom, “Poetry: A Note in Ontology,” The World's Body (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938), 139.

29. Randall Jarrell, “Graves and the White Goddess,” Yale Review 45 (1956): 467-78.

30. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 108. Irigaray uses and plays with the concept of “specularity” in many of her writings. See especially her chapter “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine” in This Sex Which Is Not One, 68-85, for the ways she relates this concept to discourse formation.

31. I only need to refer the reader to the well attended and interesting session at the 1994 MLA Conference in San Diego, “The New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory: Multicultural Perspectives,” and the recently published, The New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory: Connections and Continuities, ed. William J. Spurlin and Michael Fischer (Hamden, Conn.: Garland Publishing, 1995). Part of my fascination with (Riding) Jackson herself was my recognition of certain New Critical tenets in a poetics very much at odds with the New Criticism. (Or as Jane Marcus puts it in far more dramatic terms, “Will we be forced to acknowledge that it was a woman who invented Chinese footbinding of the critical imagination?” [“Laura Riding Roughshod,” 296].) As my own early literary training was influenced by New Critical practices, study of (Riding) Jackson enabled me a careful unhinging rather than a full-scale rejection of certain New Critical precepts: a detailing of difference within the realm of the same.

32. For example, Taffy Martin sees Marianne Moore as defined by both modernist and postmodernist poetics, Marianne Moore: Subversive Modernist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), x-xi. Ellen Berry, Curved Thought, focuses much of her discussion on considerations of Stein's modernism and postmodernism.

33. In (Riding) Jackson's late prose work The Telling, many of her previous ideals for poetry are now translated into a prose work in which she seeks to inspire a multiplicity of voices all trying to tell the “One Story.” (Riding) Jackson extols, “we bear … each singly the burden of the single sense of manifold totality … as a speaking self of it, owing its words that will put the seal of the Whole upon it” (6). And while each self's telling will necessarily differ from the next, despite their mutual concerns with the whole, the unison of their telling will enable a self-correcting practice that will result in a more certain and enhanced truth: “when we have corrected ourselves with ourselves … we shall know that we have begun to speak true by an increased hunger for true-speaking” (16). Now the medium for truth-telling is no longer poetry, but rather this communal activity of self-correcting, “unreal selves” who in addressing “totality” in unison can establish a human universality in the very actuality of their unfolding conversation. Throughout her existence (Riding) Jackson refused to give up either her belief in the value of a corrected language or of human universality. Indeed, she initially sought to rescue the ideals of human universality from an exclusively aesthetic realm, urging the ways that poetry as the medium for truth was independent of aesthetic wholes, and then rejected poetry itself.