Hiroshima Studies in English Language and Literature, Vol. 21, Nos. 1 and 2, 1971
Summary
This article was written in response to a passage in Contemporary English Poetry: An Int... more Summary This article was written in response to a passage in Contemporary English Poetry: An Introduction, by Anthony Thwaite, first published in Japan in 1957. In Mr. Thwaite's book, he assesses briefly the career of Robert Graves and the part played in it by Laura Riding [now Laura (Riding) Jackson]. In the passage to which I refer, facts about Mrs. Jackson's literary work-relationship with Mr. Graves are plainly wrong, and statements misleading. I supply corrective critical and chronological information, and attempt to show by close verbal analysis the workings of Mr. Thwaite's bias of attitude in favour of Mr. Graves. As a preface to the discussion, the article considers another critic, Douglas Day —whose work on Robert Graves, Swifter Than Reason, devotes chapters to what he calls 'the Laura Riding years', and exhibits a bias similar to that of Mr. Thwaite's. I show how statements in these chapters are self-contradictory and against the literary record. Noting how widespread such mix-statements are in current books, periodicals and newspapers, I seek to account for the bias by turning to Mr. Graves's own statements about the work-relationship. I demonstrate how Mr. Graves has attempted to revise the name 'Laura Riding' out of the successive editions of works of his, published work of hers under his own name, taken collaborative works —such as A Survey Of Modernist Poetry, A Pamphlet Against Anthologies and the magazine Epilogue (in which he was associate editor, only) —and accorded Mrs. Jackson the status of second author whereas she is by right the first. I give instances of how reliance on authority stemming from Mr. Graves has helped to mislead critical, biographical and bibliographical writers on such matters. By citations and comparisons of poems and prose, I attempt to make clear the essential differences between the work of Robert Graves and that of Laura (Riding) Jackson while at the same time indicating how much Mr. Graves depends for substance on Mrs. Jackson's work, in ways ranging from straightforward plagiary to adaptations of her thought for large-scale literary purpose.
This paper is the introduction only. The book contains the poems themselves as they originally ap... more This paper is the introduction only. The book contains the poems themselves as they originally appeared plus additional relevant matter.
Laura Riding is above all a poet, in her vision, by temperament, and in her lasting devotion to words. It may not be true to say that she is the least well-known of the great twentieth-century poets, but of those great poets her poems have, until very recently, been the least well explored and understood. Several long and sometimes contentious and sensational biographies have been written both about her, and about her part in others’ lives, but, in nearly all, the life overshadows the poems, which appear in snippets as chapter headings or quotations illustrating the life. When she was still a practising poet, in 1938, she said she regarded ‘poems as the most important form of life’, and insisted that ‘the clues to all the fundamental problems of life are to be found in poetry.’ She told Gwendolen Murphy, the sympathetic anthologist with whom she was cooperating, that ‘biographical details would be inappropriate, as belonging to mere physical living.’
This paper is the introduction only. The book contains the poems themselves as they originally a... more This paper is the introduction only. The book contains the poems themselves as they originally appeared plus additional relevant matter.
Poet: A Lying Word, Laura Riding's penultimate collection of poems, was composed between 1930 and 1933 during the most settled period of her poetic career, during her astonishingly productive partnership with Robert Graves in Majorca. She is a major poet whose work has strongly influenced others as diverse as Graves, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and John Ashbery. When still a practising poet she described going to poetry as ‘the most ambitious act of the mind’ and while she later renounced the practice of poetry, she made it clear, looking back in 1970, that she had, as poet, been ‘looking to an eventual solution in poetry of the universal problem of how to make words fulfil the human being and the human being fulfil words.’ In The Unthronged Oracle, Jack Blackmore tackled the causes of the neglect of Riding's poetry, and demonstrated the strength and depth of the poems and the continuity of thought between them and her 'post-poetic' work, in particular The Telling, her spiritual testament. Here he provides a substantial introduction arguing that Poet: A Lying Word represented both the main crisis in and the climax of Riding's poetic career, a period in which she threw her all into the crucible of poetry. The result was the most original, and in important ways the finest, collection of poems of the twentieth century.
‘The authority, the dignity of truth-telling, lost by poetry to science may gradually be regained. If it is, these poems should one day be a kind of Principia.’ — Robert Fitzgerald ‘Here is poetry as an articulation of the most exquisite consciousness, poetry as completely wakeful existence realised in words, with at the end of it the news that even poetry will not do. Here is work that reads the person reading it’ — Robert Nye
This essay examines three books: A Survey of Modernist Poetry, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves,... more This essay examines three books: A Survey of Modernist Poetry, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson, and William Empson: Among the Mandarins by John Haffenden. It shows how and why Laura Riding was the original author of the interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 in A Survey of Modernist Poetry, which provided the idea for Empson’s understanding of ‘ambiguity’ which in turn was highly significant to the subsequent development of ‘New Criticism’. It examines the history of A Survey of Modernist Poetry since its first publication in 1927, its treatment by critics and reviewers, and its mistakenly being described as a book by Robert Graves up to the present day as epitomized in John Haffenden’s biography. It also indicates that modernist or post-modernist literary criticism from 1927 onwards would have been significantly different had numerous critics, Empson among them, but other poets and authors, too, given more attention to the work of Laura Riding than to Robert Graves.
Originally published in the journal English: "English, 2015, vol. 64 no. 246, pp. 222 – 240"
This paper is the introduction only. The book contains the poems themselves as they originally ap... more This paper is the introduction only. The book contains the poems themselves as they originally appeared plus additional relevant matter.
Laura Riding’s first collection of poems was published in 1926 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press when the poet was 25. As in the case of Coleridge’s early visionary poems, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, The Close Chaplet sets the scene for the rest of her life’s work, except that where his early poetic impetus faltered hers expanded steadily through into her Collected Poems (1938) and then further into The Telling (1972) and other late prose work.
This new edition includes Riding’s first poetic manifesto, ‘A Prophecy or a Plea’ (1925), which sets the context for the poems. Mark Jacobs’ ground-breaking introduction demonstrates how this short essay turned poetry on its head, with the ensuing poems of The Close Chaplet, from the much-anthologized (if little understood) ‘The Quids’ to the remarkable but neglected ‘The Lady of the Apple’ as the consequence.
Abstract
The Close Chaplet
Laura Riding’s first collection of poems was published in 1926 by Leo... more Abstract The Close Chaplet
Laura Riding’s first collection of poems was published in 1926 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press when the poet was 25. As in the case of Coleridge’s early visionary poems, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, The Close Chaplet sets the scene for the rest of her life’s work, except that where his early poetic impetus faltered hers expanded steadily through into her Collected Poems (1938) and then further into The Telling (1972) and other late prose work.
This new edition includes Riding’s first poetic manifesto, ‘A Prophecy or a Plea’ (1925), which sets the context for the poems. Mark Jacobs’ ground-breaking introduction demonstrates how this short essay turned poetry on its head, with the ensuing poems of The Close Chaplet, from the much-anthologized (if little understood) ‘The Quids’ to the remarkable but neglected ‘The Lady of the Apple’ as the consequence.
Literary Mayhem: Personal Letters, Laura (Riding) Jackson Selected Letters 1971-1980 to Mark Jacobs, 2024
This book gives us welcome new perspectives on the life and work of Laura (Riding) Jackson. The a... more This book gives us welcome new perspectives on the life and work of Laura (Riding) Jackson. The author' s letters to Mark Jacobs provide a window into an important decade. The publication of Selected Poems in1970 and of the book version of The Telling in 1972 had marked the revival of her poetry and her re-emergence as a writer of searching and eloquent prose, after decades of relative silence following the publication of her Collected Poems, 1938. In the early 1970s Jacobs was studying Laura Riding's poetry for a doctorate, under G.S. Fraser. His work on this, and on a joint essay with Alan J. Clark, exposing the misrepresentation of her work, forms the 'business' background to the correspondence here. Her letters are instinct with intensity of scrutiny, acuity of intellect, and delicate scrupulosity. But there is also great, sometimes overwhelming strength of feeling. She starts off guardedly, but feelings of love develop and are expressed, for Jacobs and for others of her correspondents. This is her most precious currency; but she is so alive to slights and failings of every kind, that those feelings of love may flicker and change, as they do with several people mentioned, sometimes to re-emerge as strongly as before. The wounds from her mistreatment by Graves and his supporters after he and she split up in 1940 are evident and her violent reaction to a malicious account of the time she fell in love with her husband, Schuyler, is described here. Complementing the letters are Jacobs' candid memoir of a visit to the author in 1978 and the essay referred to above, revised and updated. The memoir, like the previously unpublished photograph on the cover, shows the author as rarely seen before, full of fun and life. The forthright essay exposing the poisonous misrepresentation of Laura (Riding) Jackson as a person and as a writer by Graves and his followers makes a significant step towards a just recognition of her large contribution to twentieth century writing. Jack Blackmore, November 2023 LAURA (RIDING) JACKSON
Hiroshima Studies in English Language and Literature, Vol. 21, Nos. 1 and 2, 1971
Summary
This article was written in response to a passage in Contemporary English Poetry: An Int... more Summary This article was written in response to a passage in Contemporary English Poetry: An Introduction, by Anthony Thwaite, first published in Japan in 1957. In Mr. Thwaite's book, he assesses briefly the career of Robert Graves and the part played in it by Laura Riding [now Laura (Riding) Jackson]. In the passage to which I refer, facts about Mrs. Jackson's literary work-relationship with Mr. Graves are plainly wrong, and statements misleading. I supply corrective critical and chronological information, and attempt to show by close verbal analysis the workings of Mr. Thwaite's bias of attitude in favour of Mr. Graves. As a preface to the discussion, the article considers another critic, Douglas Day —whose work on Robert Graves, Swifter Than Reason, devotes chapters to what he calls 'the Laura Riding years', and exhibits a bias similar to that of Mr. Thwaite's. I show how statements in these chapters are self-contradictory and against the literary record. Noting how widespread such mix-statements are in current books, periodicals and newspapers, I seek to account for the bias by turning to Mr. Graves's own statements about the work-relationship. I demonstrate how Mr. Graves has attempted to revise the name 'Laura Riding' out of the successive editions of works of his, published work of hers under his own name, taken collaborative works —such as A Survey Of Modernist Poetry, A Pamphlet Against Anthologies and the magazine Epilogue (in which he was associate editor, only) —and accorded Mrs. Jackson the status of second author whereas she is by right the first. I give instances of how reliance on authority stemming from Mr. Graves has helped to mislead critical, biographical and bibliographical writers on such matters. By citations and comparisons of poems and prose, I attempt to make clear the essential differences between the work of Robert Graves and that of Laura (Riding) Jackson while at the same time indicating how much Mr. Graves depends for substance on Mrs. Jackson's work, in ways ranging from straightforward plagiary to adaptations of her thought for large-scale literary purpose.
This paper is the introduction only. The book contains the poems themselves as they originally ap... more This paper is the introduction only. The book contains the poems themselves as they originally appeared plus additional relevant matter.
Laura Riding is above all a poet, in her vision, by temperament, and in her lasting devotion to words. It may not be true to say that she is the least well-known of the great twentieth-century poets, but of those great poets her poems have, until very recently, been the least well explored and understood. Several long and sometimes contentious and sensational biographies have been written both about her, and about her part in others’ lives, but, in nearly all, the life overshadows the poems, which appear in snippets as chapter headings or quotations illustrating the life. When she was still a practising poet, in 1938, she said she regarded ‘poems as the most important form of life’, and insisted that ‘the clues to all the fundamental problems of life are to be found in poetry.’ She told Gwendolen Murphy, the sympathetic anthologist with whom she was cooperating, that ‘biographical details would be inappropriate, as belonging to mere physical living.’
This paper is the introduction only. The book contains the poems themselves as they originally a... more This paper is the introduction only. The book contains the poems themselves as they originally appeared plus additional relevant matter.
Poet: A Lying Word, Laura Riding's penultimate collection of poems, was composed between 1930 and 1933 during the most settled period of her poetic career, during her astonishingly productive partnership with Robert Graves in Majorca. She is a major poet whose work has strongly influenced others as diverse as Graves, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and John Ashbery. When still a practising poet she described going to poetry as ‘the most ambitious act of the mind’ and while she later renounced the practice of poetry, she made it clear, looking back in 1970, that she had, as poet, been ‘looking to an eventual solution in poetry of the universal problem of how to make words fulfil the human being and the human being fulfil words.’ In The Unthronged Oracle, Jack Blackmore tackled the causes of the neglect of Riding's poetry, and demonstrated the strength and depth of the poems and the continuity of thought between them and her 'post-poetic' work, in particular The Telling, her spiritual testament. Here he provides a substantial introduction arguing that Poet: A Lying Word represented both the main crisis in and the climax of Riding's poetic career, a period in which she threw her all into the crucible of poetry. The result was the most original, and in important ways the finest, collection of poems of the twentieth century.
‘The authority, the dignity of truth-telling, lost by poetry to science may gradually be regained. If it is, these poems should one day be a kind of Principia.’ — Robert Fitzgerald ‘Here is poetry as an articulation of the most exquisite consciousness, poetry as completely wakeful existence realised in words, with at the end of it the news that even poetry will not do. Here is work that reads the person reading it’ — Robert Nye
This essay examines three books: A Survey of Modernist Poetry, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves,... more This essay examines three books: A Survey of Modernist Poetry, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson, and William Empson: Among the Mandarins by John Haffenden. It shows how and why Laura Riding was the original author of the interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 in A Survey of Modernist Poetry, which provided the idea for Empson’s understanding of ‘ambiguity’ which in turn was highly significant to the subsequent development of ‘New Criticism’. It examines the history of A Survey of Modernist Poetry since its first publication in 1927, its treatment by critics and reviewers, and its mistakenly being described as a book by Robert Graves up to the present day as epitomized in John Haffenden’s biography. It also indicates that modernist or post-modernist literary criticism from 1927 onwards would have been significantly different had numerous critics, Empson among them, but other poets and authors, too, given more attention to the work of Laura Riding than to Robert Graves.
Originally published in the journal English: "English, 2015, vol. 64 no. 246, pp. 222 – 240"
This paper is the introduction only. The book contains the poems themselves as they originally ap... more This paper is the introduction only. The book contains the poems themselves as they originally appeared plus additional relevant matter.
Laura Riding’s first collection of poems was published in 1926 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press when the poet was 25. As in the case of Coleridge’s early visionary poems, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, The Close Chaplet sets the scene for the rest of her life’s work, except that where his early poetic impetus faltered hers expanded steadily through into her Collected Poems (1938) and then further into The Telling (1972) and other late prose work.
This new edition includes Riding’s first poetic manifesto, ‘A Prophecy or a Plea’ (1925), which sets the context for the poems. Mark Jacobs’ ground-breaking introduction demonstrates how this short essay turned poetry on its head, with the ensuing poems of The Close Chaplet, from the much-anthologized (if little understood) ‘The Quids’ to the remarkable but neglected ‘The Lady of the Apple’ as the consequence.
Abstract
The Close Chaplet
Laura Riding’s first collection of poems was published in 1926 by Leo... more Abstract The Close Chaplet
Laura Riding’s first collection of poems was published in 1926 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press when the poet was 25. As in the case of Coleridge’s early visionary poems, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, The Close Chaplet sets the scene for the rest of her life’s work, except that where his early poetic impetus faltered hers expanded steadily through into her Collected Poems (1938) and then further into The Telling (1972) and other late prose work.
This new edition includes Riding’s first poetic manifesto, ‘A Prophecy or a Plea’ (1925), which sets the context for the poems. Mark Jacobs’ ground-breaking introduction demonstrates how this short essay turned poetry on its head, with the ensuing poems of The Close Chaplet, from the much-anthologized (if little understood) ‘The Quids’ to the remarkable but neglected ‘The Lady of the Apple’ as the consequence.
Literary Mayhem: Personal Letters, Laura (Riding) Jackson Selected Letters 1971-1980 to Mark Jacobs, 2024
This book gives us welcome new perspectives on the life and work of Laura (Riding) Jackson. The a... more This book gives us welcome new perspectives on the life and work of Laura (Riding) Jackson. The author' s letters to Mark Jacobs provide a window into an important decade. The publication of Selected Poems in1970 and of the book version of The Telling in 1972 had marked the revival of her poetry and her re-emergence as a writer of searching and eloquent prose, after decades of relative silence following the publication of her Collected Poems, 1938. In the early 1970s Jacobs was studying Laura Riding's poetry for a doctorate, under G.S. Fraser. His work on this, and on a joint essay with Alan J. Clark, exposing the misrepresentation of her work, forms the 'business' background to the correspondence here. Her letters are instinct with intensity of scrutiny, acuity of intellect, and delicate scrupulosity. But there is also great, sometimes overwhelming strength of feeling. She starts off guardedly, but feelings of love develop and are expressed, for Jacobs and for others of her correspondents. This is her most precious currency; but she is so alive to slights and failings of every kind, that those feelings of love may flicker and change, as they do with several people mentioned, sometimes to re-emerge as strongly as before. The wounds from her mistreatment by Graves and his supporters after he and she split up in 1940 are evident and her violent reaction to a malicious account of the time she fell in love with her husband, Schuyler, is described here. Complementing the letters are Jacobs' candid memoir of a visit to the author in 1978 and the essay referred to above, revised and updated. The memoir, like the previously unpublished photograph on the cover, shows the author as rarely seen before, full of fun and life. The forthright essay exposing the poisonous misrepresentation of Laura (Riding) Jackson as a person and as a writer by Graves and his followers makes a significant step towards a just recognition of her large contribution to twentieth century writing. Jack Blackmore, November 2023 LAURA (RIDING) JACKSON
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Papers by Mark Jacobs
This article was written in response to a passage in Contemporary English Poetry: An Introduction, by Anthony Thwaite, first published in Japan in 1957. In Mr. Thwaite's book, he assesses briefly the career of Robert Graves and the part played in it by Laura Riding [now Laura (Riding) Jackson]. In the passage to which I refer, facts about Mrs. Jackson's literary work-relationship with Mr. Graves are plainly wrong, and statements misleading. I supply corrective critical and chronological information, and attempt to show by close verbal analysis the workings of Mr. Thwaite's bias of attitude in favour of Mr. Graves. As a preface to the discussion, the article considers another critic, Douglas Day —whose work on Robert Graves, Swifter Than Reason, devotes chapters to what he calls 'the Laura Riding years', and exhibits a bias similar to that of Mr. Thwaite's. I show how statements in these chapters are self-contradictory and against the literary record. Noting how widespread such mix-statements are in current books, periodicals and newspapers, I seek to account for the bias by turning to Mr. Graves's own statements about the work-relationship. I demonstrate how Mr. Graves has attempted to revise the name 'Laura Riding' out of the successive editions of works of his, published work of hers under his own name, taken collaborative works —such as A Survey Of Modernist Poetry, A Pamphlet Against Anthologies and the magazine Epilogue (in which he was associate editor, only) —and accorded Mrs. Jackson the status of second author whereas she is by right the first. I give instances of how reliance on authority stemming from Mr. Graves has helped to mislead critical, biographical and bibliographical writers on such matters. By citations and comparisons of poems and prose, I attempt to make clear the essential differences between the work of Robert Graves and that of Laura (Riding) Jackson while at the same time indicating how much Mr. Graves depends for substance on Mrs. Jackson's work, in ways ranging from straightforward plagiary to adaptations of her thought for large-scale literary purpose.
Laura Riding is above all a poet, in her vision, by temperament, and in her lasting devotion to words. It may not be true to say that she is the least well-known of the great twentieth-century poets, but of those great poets her poems have, until very recently, been the least well explored and understood. Several long and sometimes contentious and sensational biographies have been written both about her, and about her part in others’ lives, but, in nearly all, the life overshadows the poems, which appear in snippets as chapter headings or quotations illustrating the life. When she was still a practising poet, in 1938, she said she regarded ‘poems as the most important form of life’, and insisted that ‘the clues to all the fundamental problems of life are to be found in poetry.’ She told Gwendolen Murphy, the sympathetic anthologist with whom she was cooperating, that ‘biographical details would be inappropriate, as belonging to mere physical living.’
Poet: A Lying Word, Laura Riding's penultimate collection of poems, was composed between 1930 and 1933 during the most settled period of her poetic career, during her astonishingly productive partnership with Robert Graves in Majorca. She is a major poet whose work has strongly influenced others as diverse as Graves, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and John Ashbery. When still a practising poet she described going to poetry as ‘the most ambitious act of the mind’ and while she later renounced the practice of poetry, she made it clear, looking back in 1970, that she had, as poet, been ‘looking to an eventual solution in poetry of the universal problem of how to make words fulfil the human being and the human being fulfil words.’
In The Unthronged Oracle, Jack Blackmore tackled the causes of the neglect of Riding's poetry, and demonstrated the strength and depth of the poems and the continuity of thought between them and her 'post-poetic' work, in particular The Telling, her spiritual testament. Here he provides a substantial introduction arguing that Poet: A Lying Word represented both the main crisis in and the climax of Riding's poetic career, a period in which she threw her all into the crucible of poetry. The result was the most original, and in important ways the finest, collection of poems of the twentieth century.
‘The authority, the dignity of truth-telling, lost by poetry to science may gradually be regained. If it is, these poems should one day be a kind of Principia.’ — Robert Fitzgerald
‘Here is poetry as an articulation of the most exquisite consciousness, poetry as completely wakeful existence realised in words, with at the end of it the news that even poetry will not do. Here is work that reads the person reading it’ — Robert Nye
Originally published in the journal English: "English, 2015, vol. 64 no. 246, pp. 222 – 240"
Laura Riding’s first collection of poems was published in 1926 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press when the poet was 25. As in the case of Coleridge’s early visionary poems, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, The Close Chaplet sets the scene for the rest of her life’s work, except that where his early poetic impetus faltered hers expanded steadily through into her Collected Poems (1938) and then further into The Telling (1972) and other late prose work.
This new edition includes Riding’s first poetic manifesto, ‘A Prophecy or a Plea’ (1925), which sets the context for the poems. Mark Jacobs’ ground-breaking introduction demonstrates how this short essay turned poetry on its head, with the ensuing poems of The Close Chaplet, from the much-anthologized (if little understood) ‘The Quids’ to the remarkable but neglected ‘The Lady of the Apple’ as the consequence.
The Close Chaplet
Laura Riding’s first collection of poems was published in 1926 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press when the poet was 25. As in the case of Coleridge’s early visionary poems, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, The Close Chaplet sets the scene for the rest of her life’s work, except that where his early poetic impetus faltered hers expanded steadily through into her Collected Poems (1938) and then further into The Telling (1972) and other late prose work.
This new edition includes Riding’s first poetic manifesto, ‘A Prophecy or a Plea’ (1925), which sets the context for the poems. Mark Jacobs’ ground-breaking introduction demonstrates how this short essay turned poetry on its head, with the ensuing poems of The Close Chaplet, from the much-anthologized (if little understood) ‘The Quids’ to the remarkable but neglected ‘The Lady of the Apple’ as the consequence.
Books by Mark Jacobs
This article was written in response to a passage in Contemporary English Poetry: An Introduction, by Anthony Thwaite, first published in Japan in 1957. In Mr. Thwaite's book, he assesses briefly the career of Robert Graves and the part played in it by Laura Riding [now Laura (Riding) Jackson]. In the passage to which I refer, facts about Mrs. Jackson's literary work-relationship with Mr. Graves are plainly wrong, and statements misleading. I supply corrective critical and chronological information, and attempt to show by close verbal analysis the workings of Mr. Thwaite's bias of attitude in favour of Mr. Graves. As a preface to the discussion, the article considers another critic, Douglas Day —whose work on Robert Graves, Swifter Than Reason, devotes chapters to what he calls 'the Laura Riding years', and exhibits a bias similar to that of Mr. Thwaite's. I show how statements in these chapters are self-contradictory and against the literary record. Noting how widespread such mix-statements are in current books, periodicals and newspapers, I seek to account for the bias by turning to Mr. Graves's own statements about the work-relationship. I demonstrate how Mr. Graves has attempted to revise the name 'Laura Riding' out of the successive editions of works of his, published work of hers under his own name, taken collaborative works —such as A Survey Of Modernist Poetry, A Pamphlet Against Anthologies and the magazine Epilogue (in which he was associate editor, only) —and accorded Mrs. Jackson the status of second author whereas she is by right the first. I give instances of how reliance on authority stemming from Mr. Graves has helped to mislead critical, biographical and bibliographical writers on such matters. By citations and comparisons of poems and prose, I attempt to make clear the essential differences between the work of Robert Graves and that of Laura (Riding) Jackson while at the same time indicating how much Mr. Graves depends for substance on Mrs. Jackson's work, in ways ranging from straightforward plagiary to adaptations of her thought for large-scale literary purpose.
Laura Riding is above all a poet, in her vision, by temperament, and in her lasting devotion to words. It may not be true to say that she is the least well-known of the great twentieth-century poets, but of those great poets her poems have, until very recently, been the least well explored and understood. Several long and sometimes contentious and sensational biographies have been written both about her, and about her part in others’ lives, but, in nearly all, the life overshadows the poems, which appear in snippets as chapter headings or quotations illustrating the life. When she was still a practising poet, in 1938, she said she regarded ‘poems as the most important form of life’, and insisted that ‘the clues to all the fundamental problems of life are to be found in poetry.’ She told Gwendolen Murphy, the sympathetic anthologist with whom she was cooperating, that ‘biographical details would be inappropriate, as belonging to mere physical living.’
Poet: A Lying Word, Laura Riding's penultimate collection of poems, was composed between 1930 and 1933 during the most settled period of her poetic career, during her astonishingly productive partnership with Robert Graves in Majorca. She is a major poet whose work has strongly influenced others as diverse as Graves, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and John Ashbery. When still a practising poet she described going to poetry as ‘the most ambitious act of the mind’ and while she later renounced the practice of poetry, she made it clear, looking back in 1970, that she had, as poet, been ‘looking to an eventual solution in poetry of the universal problem of how to make words fulfil the human being and the human being fulfil words.’
In The Unthronged Oracle, Jack Blackmore tackled the causes of the neglect of Riding's poetry, and demonstrated the strength and depth of the poems and the continuity of thought between them and her 'post-poetic' work, in particular The Telling, her spiritual testament. Here he provides a substantial introduction arguing that Poet: A Lying Word represented both the main crisis in and the climax of Riding's poetic career, a period in which she threw her all into the crucible of poetry. The result was the most original, and in important ways the finest, collection of poems of the twentieth century.
‘The authority, the dignity of truth-telling, lost by poetry to science may gradually be regained. If it is, these poems should one day be a kind of Principia.’ — Robert Fitzgerald
‘Here is poetry as an articulation of the most exquisite consciousness, poetry as completely wakeful existence realised in words, with at the end of it the news that even poetry will not do. Here is work that reads the person reading it’ — Robert Nye
Originally published in the journal English: "English, 2015, vol. 64 no. 246, pp. 222 – 240"
Laura Riding’s first collection of poems was published in 1926 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press when the poet was 25. As in the case of Coleridge’s early visionary poems, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, The Close Chaplet sets the scene for the rest of her life’s work, except that where his early poetic impetus faltered hers expanded steadily through into her Collected Poems (1938) and then further into The Telling (1972) and other late prose work.
This new edition includes Riding’s first poetic manifesto, ‘A Prophecy or a Plea’ (1925), which sets the context for the poems. Mark Jacobs’ ground-breaking introduction demonstrates how this short essay turned poetry on its head, with the ensuing poems of The Close Chaplet, from the much-anthologized (if little understood) ‘The Quids’ to the remarkable but neglected ‘The Lady of the Apple’ as the consequence.
The Close Chaplet
Laura Riding’s first collection of poems was published in 1926 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press when the poet was 25. As in the case of Coleridge’s early visionary poems, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, The Close Chaplet sets the scene for the rest of her life’s work, except that where his early poetic impetus faltered hers expanded steadily through into her Collected Poems (1938) and then further into The Telling (1972) and other late prose work.
This new edition includes Riding’s first poetic manifesto, ‘A Prophecy or a Plea’ (1925), which sets the context for the poems. Mark Jacobs’ ground-breaking introduction demonstrates how this short essay turned poetry on its head, with the ensuing poems of The Close Chaplet, from the much-anthologized (if little understood) ‘The Quids’ to the remarkable but neglected ‘The Lady of the Apple’ as the consequence.