Laura (Riding) Jackson

Begun as a dictionary in the 1930's, this project developed into a re-evaluation of language itself. The author concentrated on the discovery of the principles that embed truth and meaning in words, and thus this study touches on literature, philosophy, linguistics and lexicography.

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.In The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language, Laura (Riding) Jackson examines the subjects of poetry, language, and truth; the conflict between truth and art; and the range of human attitudes to the prospect of truth-speaking. Also included are a series of comments on and judgments of the poets Coleridge, Clare, Eliot, Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Lowell, Pound, Dylan Thomas, and W. C. Williams and selections from her correspondence ranging from 1948 to 1984.Laura (Riding) Jackson’s first published poems appeared in 1923 in magazines such as The Fugitive. In 1925 she moved to England, and during thirteen years abroad wrote some twenty books of poetry, criticism, and fiction. In 1941 she renounced poetry, married Schuyler B. Jackson, and collaborated with him on what would become Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words. The Telling, her spiritual testament, was published in 1972. In 1991 she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for her lifetime contribution to poetry. She died on September 2, 1991.John Nolan is a member of the Laura (Riding) Jackson Board of Literary Management, and co-editor, with Alan J. Clark, of Laura (Riding) Jackson’s Under the Mind’s Watch (2004). He lives in London, England.

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.In The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language, Laura (Riding) Jackson examines the subjects of poetry, language, and truth; the conflict between truth and art; and the range of human attitudes to the prospect of truth-speaking. Also included are a series of comments on and judgments of the poets Coleridge, Clare, Eliot, Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Lowell, Pound, Dylan Thomas, and W. C. Williams and selections from her correspondence ranging from 1948 to 1984.Laura (Riding) Jackson’s first published poems appeared in 1923 in magazines such as The Fugitive. In 1925 she moved to England, and during thirteen years abroad wrote some twenty books of poetry, criticism, and fiction. In 1941 she renounced poetry, married Schuyler B. Jackson, and collaborated with him on what would become Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words. The Telling, her spiritual testament, was published in 1972. In 1991 she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for her lifetime contribution to poetry. She died on September 2, 1991.John Nolan is a member of the Laura (Riding) Jackson Board of Literary Management, and co-editor, with Alan J. Clark, of Laura (Riding) Jackson’s Under the Mind’s Watch (2004). He lives in London, England.

A rich cross-section of the modernist poet and critic's work from 1923 to 1987.

Always ahead of her time, no other major poet of the last century enters the twenty-first so fresh, so essentially unexplored as does Laura Riding. Her formidable credentials as a modernist need no longer distract attention from the class-of-her-own this writer occupies. Beginning in spiritual respect for Shelley, Whitman, and Francis Thompson, Riding's resolve to work toward nothing less than "the essence of the good in language" carries her across an entire poetic world within this volume -- as it afterwards carried her out of poetry altogether.This centennial volume presents the entire content of the 1980 edition, together with the author's retrospective Introduction and Appendices, corrected and reset. The poem-text reproduces, with the few errata corrected, the typography and design of the celebrated first edition of 1938, as supervised by the author herself. Included are the ten memorable full-page illustrations by John Aldridge.