Laura Riding

American poet, novelist, essayist, and short-story writer.

• Born: January 16, 1901
• Place of birth: New York, New York
• Died: September 2, 1991
• Place of death: Wabasso, Florida

Biography

Laura Riding was born Laura Reichenthal. Her father, Nathan, a Polish Jew, was a largely self-educated man who had immigrated to the United States in 1884, when he was fifteen years old. He was a founding member of the American Socialist Party, and he hoped Laura was destined for a political career. She was the daughter of his second wife, Sadie Edersheim, a German immigrant. Laura attended the Girls’ High School in Brooklyn, but at fifteen years old she rebelled against her father’s wishes and announced her vocation to be poetry. Symbolically, she dropped her family name, calling herself Laura Riding from then on. She always revered her father for his goodness, but she saw poetry as a better way than politics to influence society.

From 1918 to 1921 she attended Cornell University, but she did not graduate. Instead, in 1920 she married a professor, Louis Gottschalk, and began her career as a poet. Some of her poems were published in the Fugitive, the poetry magazine edited at Vanderbilt University by John Crowe Ransom. It was the main vehicle of the group of southern poets that included Allen Tate. Riding saw herself as an honorary member of the Fugitive group, and they provided her first appreciative audience, giving her an award for her poem “The Quids.”

This poem also caught the eye of the English poet and classicist Robert Graves, who included a comparison of Riding with Gertrude Stein in his 1925 essay “Contemporary Techniques of Poetry.” He and his wife, Nancy, invited Riding, then living in Greenwich Village, to England. In the aftermath of her divorce from Gottschalk, this plan suited her exactly; she also desired to find a more discerning audience. Her arrival in England in January 1926 marked the beginning of a turbulent but strong and fruitful liaison between her and Graves. They worked together on A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), considered by many to be a model of lucidity, with Riding contributing the material on American poetry. In the same year they began writing A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928). A ménage à trois developed; Riding was more sexually liberated than Nancy Graves, and her strengths seemed to be what Robert, still suffering from shell-shock from his World War I experiences, needed.

Although Graves admired Riding’s work immensely and sought to promote it, her poetry remained largely unrecognized. The Close Chaplet (1926), for example, sold only twenty-five copies. In an effort to attain wider sales, the two established their own press, the Seizin Press, largely with Graves’s money. In 1928, Riding's essays in Contemporaries and Snobs (1928) and Anarchism Is Not Enough (1928) brought her into conflict with mainstream modernism, as she attacked as “vulgar” such writers as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Marianne Moore.

In 1929 Riding jumped from a third-floor window as a result of difficulties with her complicated relationship with Graves and his wife. Graves’s guilt over this finally broke up his marriage and led to his resolve to leave England with Riding. They settled in the picturesque mountain village of Deya on the island of Majorca in the Mediterranean, where they lived together until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. They attracted an assortment of literati and artists, and both worked hard on their own projects. Graves was always by far the more successful commercially, but he always insisted that Riding was the better writer and the person who had influenced him above all. Neither Riding’s projects—such as the Epilogue manifesto books (1935–37) and A Trojan Ending (1937), her response to Graves’s I, Claudius (1934)—nor the Seizin Press fared well.

After a brief return to England and unsuccessful attempts to spread her idealism, Riding began to consider returning to the United States rather than to Majorca. An American critic and writer, Schuyler B. Jackson, had praised her work highly. She crossed the Atlantic with Graves in 1939 to stay on the Jacksons’ farm in Pennsylvania. Shortly after, she “renounced” poetry. She wrote later in The Telling, her 1972 personal statement, that the language of poetry could take her no further toward the expression of truth, as it was “failing [her] kind of seriousness.”

Riding broke up the Jacksons’ marriage. She and Graves parted, and Riding married Jackson in 1941, becoming Laura Riding Jackson. She began working with him on a “Dictionary of Exact Meaning,” which was not published. Her views on reality and truth as a moral crusade often seem reminiscent of the first great dictionary maker, Samuel Johnson. Riding and Jackson eventually settled in Florida, where Jackson died in 1968. Belated recognition came to Riding in 1973 with a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1979 with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She died in 1991.

Although she eventually wrote more prose than poetry, it is as a poet that Riding is best remembered, particularly as a poet of the 1920s. Her religious, even mystical devotion to poetry as a medium of truth, essentially romantic rather than modernist, came from an unshakable sense of her own vocation and rightness. She had little time for those who claimed that her poetry was too difficult. She was reluctant to have her poetry anthologized, so that it remains doubly inaccessible. Kenneth Rexroth has called her “the greatest lost poet in American literature.” Her work has continued to be published after her death.

Author Works

Poetry:

The Close Chaplet, 1926

Voltaire: A Biographical Fantasy, 1927

Love as Love, Death as Death, 1928

Poems: A Joking Word, 1930

Twenty Poems Less, 1930

Laura and Francisca: A Poem, 1931

Poet: A Lying Word, 1933

Americans, 1934

Collected Poems, 1938, 1980 (revised 2001 as The Poems of Laura Riding: A Newly Revised Edition of the 1938/1980 Collection)

Selected Poems: In Five Sets, 1970

First Awakenings: The Early Poems of Laura Riding, 1992

A Selection of the Poems of Laura Riding, 1996 (Robert Nye, editor)

Long Fiction:

No Decency Left, 1932 (with Robert Graves as Barbara Rich)

14A, 1934 (with George Ellidge)

A Trojan Ending, 1937, 1984

Description of Life, 1980

Short Fiction:

Experts Are Puzzled, 1930 (includes essays)

Progress of Stories, 1935

Lives of Wives, 1939

Nonfiction:

A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 1927 (with Robert Graves)

A Pamphlet against Anthologies, 1928 (with Graves)

Contemporaries and Snobs, 1928

Anarchism Is Not Enough, 1928

Convalescent Conversations, 1936 (as Madeleine Vara)

The Telling, 1972

Communications of Broad Reference, 1983

The Word Woman and Other Related Writings, 1993 (Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark, editors)

Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words, and Supplementary Essays, 1997 (with Schuyler B. Jackson; William Harmon, editor)

Essays from “Epilogue,” 1935-1937, 2001 (with Graves; Mark Jacobs, editor)

Under the Mind's Watch: Concerning Issues of Language, Literature, Life of Contemporary Bearing, 2004 (John Nolal and Alan J. Clark, editors)

The Failure of Poetry, the Promise of Language, 2007 (John Nolan, editor)

On the Continuing of the Continuing, 2008

The Person I Am: The Literary Memoirs of Laura (Riding) Jackson, 2011 (John Nolan and Carroll Ann Friedmann, editors)

Children’s/Young Adult Literature:

Four Unposted Letters to Catherine, 1930

Translations:

Anatole France at Home, 1926 (of Anatole France’s Anatole France à La Béchellerie; Marcel Le Goff, editor)

Almost Forgotten Germany, 1936 (by Georg Schwarz; translated with Robert Graves)

Edited Texts:

Everybody’s Letters, 1933

Epilogue: A Critical Summary, 1935–37 (3 volumes)

The World and Ourselves, 1938

Miscellaneous:

The Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader, 2005 (Elizabeth Friedmann, editor)

Bibliography

Adams, Barbara. The Enemy Self: Poetry and Criticism of Laura Riding. UMI Research Press, 1990. Critiques and interprets Riding’s poetry, her use of “self” in literature, and the psychological aspects of her poetry. Includes a foreword by Hugh Kenner. Bibliography and index.

Baker, Deborah. In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding. Grove Press, 1993. The well-researched definitive biography of Riding. Baker does a good job of revealing the character of an obtuse author who was difficult to understand, kept reinventing herself, and was estranged from her colleagues. Bibliography and index.

Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace: The Life of Laura (Riding) Jackson. Persea Books, 2005. Friedmann worked closely with Riding and had access to all of Riding’s papers while crafting this authorized biography.

Graves, Richard Perceval. The Years with Laura, 1926–1940. 1990. Robert Graves, vol. 2, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986–90. 2 vols. The second volume of a biography of Robert Graves as told by his nephew, who had access to family documents. Covers in detail Graves’s years with Riding.

Seymour, Miranda. Robert Graves: Life on the Edge. Henry Holt, 1995. Includes a lengthy discourse on Riding’s life with Graves. Seymour was chosen by Graves’s widow and son to write this biography and was given unprecedented access to materials about his private life.

Wexler, Joyce Piell. Laura Riding: A Bibliography. Garland Publishing, 1981. A 173-page reference book on Riding.

Wexler, Joyce Piell. Laura Riding’s Pursuit of Truth. Ohio UP 1979. A critical analysis of Riding’s place in American letters.