Laura Riding

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Laura (Riding) Jackson (January 16, 1901 - September 2, 1991) was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer.

She was born Laura Reichenthal in New York to a family of Austrian Jewish immigrants, and educated at Cornell University, where she began to write poetry, publishing first (1923-26) under the name Laura Riding Gottschalk. She became associated with the Fugitives and shared much of their poetic credo. Her first marriage, to the historian Louis Gottschalk, ended in divorce in 1925, at the end of which year she went to England at the invitation of Robert Graves and his wife Nancy Nicholson. She would remain in Europe for nearly 14 years.

Her first collection of poetry, The Close Chaplet, was published in 1926, and during the following year she assumed the surname Riding. By this time her poetry had become much more original: generally abandoning traditional metres for a highly unconventional form of free verse. She, Robert Graves, and Nancy Nicholson were based in London until Riding's failed suicide-attempt in 1929. It is generally agreed that this episode was a major cause of the break up of Graves's first marriage: the whole affair caused a famous literary scandal. Thereafter, until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Riding and Graves lived in Mediterranean exile, building a house in Deya, Mallorca. Between 1936 and 1939 the pair lived in England, France, and Switzerland; Graves accompanied Riding on her return to the USA in 1939. In that year they parted (rather acrimoniously) and she married Schuyler B. Jackson in 1941.

Riding and Graves were highly productive from the start of their association, though after they moved to Majorca they became even more so. While still in London they had set up (1927) a private press (The Seizin Press), collaborated on A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) (which some believe inaugurated the New Criticism), A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928), and other works. In Majorca the Seizin Press was enlarged to become a publishing imprint, producing inter alia the substantial hardbound critical magazine Epilogue (1935-1938), edited by Riding with Graves as associate editor. Throughout their association both of them steadily produced volumes of major poetry, culminating for each with a Collected Poems in 1938.

Riding began by taking a neo-Platonic view of poetry, in that she viewed poetry as the conduit for metaphysical truths. She was also highly influenced by neo-Romantic views of the poet as being the "unacknowledged legislator of the world," a sort of secular prophet. After World War II she lost her faith in poetry, however, and "renounced" it, choosing to concentrate on her linguistics-influenced philosophy. This decision was in some ways indicative of the renunciation of Platonism and Metaphysics after World War II that goes by the name of Post-Modernism. Therefore, her Collected Poems is one of the key Modernist texts. Progress of Stories, a short-story collection, is probably her best prose work. However, it should be noted that after 1945 she continued to write and publish prose, mainly on the subjects of philosophy and linguistics. "The Telling" is probably her major work from this period.

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