JACKSON, Laura (Riding)

Born Laura Reichenthal, 16 January 1901, New York, New York; died 1991

Also wrote under: Laura Riding Gottschalk, Barbara Rich, Laura Riding

Daughter of Nathaniel S. and Sarah Edersheim Reichenthal; married Louis Gottschalk, 1920; Schuyler Jackson, 1941 (died 1970)

Laura Riding Jackson, raised in a nonreligious Jewish household actively espousing socialism, is best known for her strikingly original poetry, although she has also written criticism, novels, and biographical sketches. She attended Cornell University, married Louis Gottschalk (divorced, 1925), then spent 13 years abroad. She and Robert Graves were companions, establishing the Seizin Press in 1927 in Majorca. In 1939 they came back to America, where Laura met and married Schuyler Jackson (poet, farmer, and contributing editor of Time). For almost 30 years, she and Jackson worked on a reference work called the Dictionary of Exact Meaning. Schuyler Jackson died in 1970, and the work was finally published as Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words, and Supplementary Essays in 1997.

During the dozen years of Jackson's association with Graves, the two collaborated on literary criticism and on one odd satirical novel, No Decency Left (1932). A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) is a perceptive discussion of innovative techniques in poetry, such as those practiced by e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. It analyzes the shortcomings of "temporary fads" such as Imagism and Georgianism and argues that modern experimental poetry, some of which they condemn to an early death, has been influenced by nonrepresentational art. Poets have too often simply abandoned coherent statement, creating abstract arrangements of emotionally laden phrases and sounds. Jackson also shared with Graves an interest in the Greco-Roman world and the status of women in ancient times, as evidenced by her novel A Trojan Ending (1937, reprint 1984) and her biographical sketches of famous women, Lives of Wives (1939, reissued 1995).

Most of Jackson's poetry is free verse, with a sensitive use of assonance and repetition and relatively little concern for rhyme. Each poem is a different problem, and each seeks to match sound to sense. In this Jackson has been compared with Gertrude Stein. Her poetry is often simultaneously playful and serious; sometimes there's a trace of condescension toward nonpoetic thinking. In the first stanza of "Further Details," for example, the poet, who presumably arrives at the "higher" truth intuitively and holistically, speaks to the analytical, rational pursuer of knowledge: "The reward of curiosity / In such as you / (Statistician of doubt) / Is increased cause of curiosity. / And the punishment thereof, / To be not a cat."

Jackson is concerned with mental experience more than with sense experience. She favors philosophical subjects—the coexistence of multiplicity and sameness, the mysterious transformations of life and death, the ambiguous relationship between body and mind, the nature of love. Some readers find her poems obscure, but she implies this is the reader's fault, not hers: "Doom is where I am and I want to make this plain because I know there are people to whom it can be plain" (preface to Poems: A Joking Word, 1930). She sometimes combines humor with metaphysical fantasy, as in the delightful creation story, "The Quids." Other poems, like the enigmatic "Lucrece and Nara," convey some eerie insight quite beyond rational explanation. In 1943 Graves referred to Jackson as writing in "the supreme female I, the original Triple Muse, who in her original Olympian mountain was mother of Apollo, not his chorus-girl troupe."

Her poetry has never achieved widespread popularity with general readers, but it is an important part of the modern flight from the conventions of 19th-century romanticism. Her diction shows a deliberate avoidance of traditional sentiments, a bare minimum of imagery and metaphor, a tendency to abstraction. The vocabulary is often deceptively simple, yet the reader must intuit meaning from limited clues. At its worst, this may require sheer guesswork. At its best, it achieves a delicate precision and economy in the expression of complex meanings.

Other Works:

The Close Chaplet (1926). Voltaire: A Biographical Fantasy (1927). Anarchism Is Not Enough (1928). Contemporaries and Snobs (1928). Love As Love, Death As Death (1928). Twenty Poems Less (1930). Laura and Francesco (1931, with R. Graves, 1932). The Life of the Dead (1933). Poet: A Lying Word (1933). Four Unposted Letters to Catherine (1933, 1993). Americans (1934). Progress of Stories (1935, 1994). Collected Poems (1938). Selected Poems (taken from 1938's Collected Poems, 1970). The Telling (1970). Description of Life (uncorrected proof, 1980). How a Poem Comes to Be: A Poem for James F. Mathias (1980). A Poem (1980). Some Communications of Broad Reference (1983). The Poems of Laura Riding (1980, 1986). Experts Are Puzzled (reissue, 1985). The First Awakenings: The Early Poems (1992). A Selection of the Poems of Laura Riding (1994). Laura Riding: Selected Poems in Five Sets (reissue, 1995). A Short Sentence for Private Reflection on the Universal Length of Meaning (1995). The Word Woman and Other Related Writings (reissue, 1994).

Bibliography:

Adams, B. B., The Enemy Self: Poetry and Criticism of Laura Riding (1990). Baker, D., In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (1993). Graves, R. P., Robert Graves: The Years with Laura, 1926-1940 (1990). Seymour, M., The Telling (reissue, 1999). Van Hook, B. A., The Use of Myth in Laura Riding's Selected Poems (1993). Wexler, J. P. Laura Riding's Pursuit of Truth (1979). Wexler, J. P., Laura Riding, A Bibliography (1981).

Reference works:

Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia (1987). CAA (1944). Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS.

Other references:

American Literature (1992). Critical Inquiry (Spring 1992). CQ (Spring 1971). Poetry (Aug. 1932, May 1939). Guide to the Laura (Riding) Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson Collection at Cornell University (1998). Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Promise of Language: Catalogue of an Exhibition, October 1998-January 1999 (1998).

—KATHERINE SNIPES