"The Laura Riding Question: Modernism, Poetry, and Truth." Modern Language Quarterly 66.1 (2005): 85-114

The Laura Riding Question:

Modernism, Poetry, and Truth

Ella Zohar Ophir

Laura Riding, a name long obscure, has in the last few years made a number of signifi cant reappearances. Vassiliki Kolocotroni’s Mod-

ernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (s 1998), a successor to theclassic Backgrounds of Modern Literature, offers excerpts of A Survey of Modernist Poetry, the barbed, astute study Riding coauthored with Rob-ert Graves. Cary Nelson’s Anthology of Modern American Poetry, publishedin 2001, includes three of Riding’s poems, where the old Norton stan-dard Modern Poetry had none. In the same year the University of Cali-yfornia Press brought out a scholarly edition of Riding’s Anarchism Is Not Enough, and Persea Books reissued The Poems of Laura Riding after it ghad been out of print for several years. A decade earlier Hugh Ken-ner had expressed the hope that Barbara Adams’s study The Enemy Selfwould “launch an avalanche of critical attention” to Riding’s work.1 It did not, and even in light of the republications of the last few years theprospects for Riding’s integration into the history and study of mod-ernist literature remain uncertain.2

In 1979 Joyce Piell Wexler’s Laura Riding’s Pursuit of Truth laid thehgroundwork for academic study of Riding; Adams’s study, publishedin 1990, showed how much foundational work had still been left todo. Approaching Riding’s vast and virtually unexplored oeuvre, Wexler

Modern Language Quarterly 66:1 (March 2005): 85–114. © 2005 University of Washington.y

1 Kenner’s remark appears in his foreword to Barbara Adams, The Enemy Self: Poetry and Criticism of Laura Riding (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press,g 1990), viii.

2 Like many scholars, I have preferred the name Laura Riding to the cumber-some Laura (Riding) Jackson, which she adopted after her marriage in 1941.

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and Adams identifi ed its prominent features, charted lines of inter-nal development, and laid out close readings of numerous individualpoems. Their arguments for the literary-historical importance of Rid-ing’s work, however, emerged ultimately indistinct. The energy of bothbooks is divided mainly between biographical reconstruction and exe-getical labors that, however necessary, tend to keep the reader revolv-ing in the orb of Riding’s idiosyncratic poetics and idées fi xes.

More sustained attempts to understand Riding’s work historically have come more recently, notably from Jerome McGann, Lisa Samu-els, and Jeanne Heuving. Heuving considers Riding’s resolve to forgea new poetics in relation to comparable undertakings by Eliot and theNew Critics; she also fi nds in Riding’s poetry specifi cally feminist “anti-holistic and anti-mirroring” principles and practices and links her,on these grounds, to Gertrude Stein and the early Marianne Moore.3

McGann understands Riding’s poetry as “a continuation of modern-ism’s constructivist line (Pound, Williams, Stein, Oppen, Zukofsky),which emphasized the word-as-such,” and thus also as a precursor of the experimental poetry of the last decades of the century (CharlesBernstein, Ron Silliman, and others).4 In passing, however, he distin-guishes her poetry from her critical and theoretical writings, which,he indicates, align her with a different strain of modernism markedout by “Yeats, Pound [again], Stein [again], and Eliot” and character-ized by “polemical and philosophical commitments” of the sort “largely forsworn by the next generation of poets” (134). In the delicate termcommitments McGann appears to include everything from Yeats’s cos-smology to Pound’s economic theories—it is a kind of shorthand for modernist system building in all its manifestations. The implicationthat this is at odds with her poetic practice is not pursued.

In the introduction to her 2001 edition of Anarchism Is Not Enough,Samuels positions Riding as distinctly opposed to theoretical commit-dments. The protean Pound is again a point of reference (this time fi g-uring as the public pedagogue of ABC of Reading andg Guide to Kulchur),r

3 Jeanne Heuving, “Laura (Riding) Jackson’s ‘Really New’ Poem,” in Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers, ed. Margaret Dickie and ThomasTravisano (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 192.

4 Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, NJ:mPrinceton University Press, 1993), 134.

Ophir The Laura Riding Question 87

and the Poundian legacy Samuels identifi es is a kind of writing that sheproposes we call “Other Criticism”: a fearlessly self-entitled nontradi-tion that “insists on eclectic and subjective processes,” exemplifi ed by works from William Carlos Williams’s Embodiment of Knowledge to thoseeof Bataille, Olson, Zukofsky, and, more recently, Angela Carter, CharlesBernstein, and Susan Howe. “All are self-conscious, at times quasi-mystical about literary commentary, and all believe that attentive indi-viduals (not just credentialed specialists) have the right to address liter-ary and cultural experience.”5

Samuels offers a compelling analysis of how some of Anarchism’smost extreme pronouncements are a way of claiming poetry for thelarger project of resistance to commodifi cation. She interprets Rid-ing’s declarations that poetry is “designed waste”—“idle, sterile, nar-row, destroying”—as an attempt to “rescue poetry from its supposedirrelevance” by defying the “Western preoccupation with utility” (xxii–xxiii). Anarchism, however, marks only one stage in the development of Riding’s poetics; considered in isolation, it can produce a skewed imageof both the character of her thought and its connection to modern-ism. But Samuels’s characterization of Other Criticism, which defi antly reclaims from “specialists” a “right” to speak, touches on the conditionthat can teach us most, I believe, about Riding and her connectionto modernism. “Attentive individuals,” of course, were never formally deprived of any such right, but one of the forces that produced mod-ernism was the increasingly exercised right of other individuals to pay no attention.

The concept of modernism grows less coherent by the year; recent scholarship on the aesthetic practices of the fi rst four decades of thetwentieth century has left few of the old defi nitions intact. Riding’scareer, however, dramatically exemplifi es one of the features that stilldefi ne this troublesome but hardly dispensable concept. Some of themost diverse modernist practices are linked by a common recogni-tion that the status of artistic and literary endeavor had been throwninto question. They respond to a pressure not only to interrogate the

5 Lisa Samuels, introduction to Laura Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough, ed. Lisa Samuels (Berkeley: University of California PressSamuels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 20012001) xiv xiii; hereafter cited as), xiv, xiii; hereafter cited as A.

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assumptions and conventions of their art but to justify its continuationin any form: to formulate a persuasive claim to relevance for a market of culture consumers with so much else to instruct, delight, and other-wise distract it.6 This pressure arose at least in part from the diffi culty of making creative work fi nancially viable. But writers refl ected ruefully not only on departed eras of enlightened patronage but on eras that were less enamored of the empirical model of knowledge and in whichliterature and the arts commanded greater cultural authority.7

Modernist writers found various ways of staking their claims tocultural authority. While most poets felt compelled to formulate state-ments about the value of poetry, few insisted that its value had to betruth-value. They were more inclined to question the coherence of theconcept of truth than to try to appropriate for poetry the value that adhered to it. Williams, for instance, claimed for poetry the value of “knowledge” and trivialized the knowledge claims of other forms of inquiry. “The acquirement and possession of knowledge has an inhu-man phase,” he declared. “It is called Science or Philosophy.”8 But hisclaim for the knowledge value of poetry was advanced within a theory of language that apparently disposed of the conception of truth assuch, a theory that Gerald L. Bruns once helpfully defi ned as “Orphic.”The idea is that “poetic speech” not only signifi es the world but is “theground of all signifi cation—an expressive movement which ‘objectifi es’the world . . . which establishes the world within the horizon of humanknowing and so makes signifi cation possible.”9 Thus Williams claims

6 Michael Levenson offers a pithy review of the transformation of modernist studies in his introduction to the recent Cambridge Companion to Modernism. It will, he writes, “prove better to be minimalist in our defi nitions of that conveniently fl ac-cid term Modernist and maximalist in our accounts of the diverset modernizing works gand movements, which are sometimes deeply congruent with one another, and just as often opposed or even contradictory.” Nonetheless, “crisis is inevitably the central term of art in discussions of this turbulent cultural moment” (The Cambridge Compan-ion to Modernism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,m 1999], 3–4).

7 I use the terms empirical model of knowledge and e empiricism interchangeably to mdenote the epistemology that holds that true knowledge is the product of observation and experimentation, and that only propositions that can be disproved are candi-dates for judgment in terms of truth or falsity.

8 William Carlos Williams, The Embodiment of Knowledge, ed. Ron Loewinsohn (New York: New Directions, 1974), 41.

9 Gerald L. Bruns, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language: A Critical and Historical Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,y 1974), 1.


that “the value of the imagination to the writer consists in its ability tomake words,” because “when we name it, life exists.”10 No less retiring than Williams in his claims for the power and relevance of poetry, Wal-lace Stevens counseled nonetheless that “we have been a little insaneabout the truth. We have had an obsession”; he saw the value of poetry in its construction of hypothetical but effi cacious “supreme fi ctions.”11

Riding is distinguished by her insistence on defi ning the valueof poetry as truth-value. Compared to Williams and Stevens, she may seem to have adopted a philosophically backward stance, but she wasnot altogether misguided.12 After all, she was confronting not a society that had, on cue from Nietzsche or William James, blithely disposedof the concept of truth as the accurate account of the real, but onethat indubitably continued to honor a particular conception—the sci-entifi c—of what constitutes an accurate account. In light of the intel-lectual prestige of science, only truth-value could secure for poetry the authority Riding wanted for it. Any other formulation of its valuewould, she felt, render it precariously subservient, merely “expressive,”or ornamental.

Riding’s apparently eccentric preoccupation with truth is a prod-uct of the same cultural crucible that brought forth the other aestheticsingularities of her age. Heuving does make this connection. “In anage of science and specialization,” she writes, “[Riding] shared withEliot and the New Critics the attempt to formulate a poetry that wouldhave legitimacy as an important form of knowledge” (201). The claimis that these writers undertook to “legitimate” poetry by asserting that it constitutes—or communicates?—“an important form of knowledge.”But is this to assume that we have, or that Riding, Eliot, or the New Crit-ics had, a taxonomy of knowledge forms? And within that taxonomy a

10 William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1970), 120, 115.

11 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New nYork: Random House, 1951), 33.

12 Nor was she alone. We fi nd the young Pound, for instance, asserting that “the arts, literature, poesy, are a science, just as chemistry is a science. Their subject is man, mankind and the individual”; and that, a fortiori, the “data” furnished by the arts “are sound and the data of generalizing psychologists and social theoreticians are usually unsound, for the serious artist is scientifi c and the theorist is usually empiric in the medieval fashion” (“The Serious Artist,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot [New York: New Directions, 1968], 42, 46).

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hierarchy? (Are there forms of knowledge that are, in relation to oth-ers, unimportant?)

Heuving provokes these questions, but she does not pursue them.She briefl y indicates Riding’s difference from the mandarins thus:“Whereas Eliot and the New Critics sought to secure poetry’s impor-tance by asserting a separate realm for it, [Riding] eschewed what shesaw as a professionalization and aestheticization of art” (201). It is not clear exactly what is attributed to Eliot and Co. (What is the nature of the “separate realm” they defi ned? What sort of knowledge did they claim as its provenance?) But the more immediate question is how Heu-ving defi nes Riding’s alternative strategy. Here, however, she falls back on the brambles of Riding’s own vocabulary: “[Riding] thought that what the age needed was for poetry to become more itself: ‘thought inits fi nal condition of truth,’ urging a poetry in which an ‘unreal self’‘by taking the universe apart will have reintegrated it’ with her own‘vitality’” (201). Readers who manage to follow this line of the argu-ment will fi nd that Riding’s alternative does not appear signifi cantly different from the “separate realm” attributed to the New Critics. Rid-ing, Heuving explains, “postulated through her concept of an ‘unrealself,’ an entity apart from [social] orders” (195), and she quotes Rid-ing’s statement that “the ‘unreal self is to me poetry’” (196). Heuving would like to dissociate Riding from defensive isolationism, but it is not clear that she succeeds.

McGann’s exposition of Riding’s thought, unlike Heuving’s, is part of a broader look at how some twentieth-century poetics interlock withtheories of language and truth. McGann is right to stress that, for Rid-ing, the claim of poets to truth was based not on quasi-mystical rev-elation but on their intimate understanding of the means of truth’sexpression: “Truth’s integrity . . . lay in language itself. . . . Poetry’sspecial privilege lay in its unique devotion to language as such” (124).But when he argues that “truth for Riding is a ‘telling,’ an enactment”(126), he takes a conception of truth from the later Riding that is actu-ally an existential one, and identifi es it with a loosely poststructural-ist notion of language “as the entirety of the scene where truth as anexchange is represented” and of “truth,” therefore, as simply a functionof a system of linguistic signifi cation (133–34). This account cannot explain the whole evolving complex of Riding’s poetry and poetics or


the sheer tenacity of her claims for the truth-value of poetry—or, ulti-mately, her connection to modernism.

Like Heuving, McGann connects Riding’s preoccupation withtruth and knowledge to the prestige of science in the modern era13 andargues that Riding did not respond by conceiving of poetry as some-how autonomous, existing in a realm separate from that social order inwhich science and the scientized disciplines of knowledge held sway. Hetakes one of her later poems as a model of self-referentiality: “Language-as-such rises up as the poem’s central subject. . . . The poem is not allowed to point toward any truth beyond its own active features, itsown textuality” (133). But he is quick to add that the poem is not “set apart from the reader in some aesthetic condition of disinterest” (133),insofar as it forces the reader to confront the nature of language.

Few things elicit greater critical opprobrium than the appearanceof disengagement; it is hard, indeed, to know which is more responsiblefor the pall lingering over literary modernism, its reputation for fascis-tic politics or its reputation for a world-forsaking, hermetic autonomy.The impulse to dissociate Riding from the idea of aesthetic or poeticautonomy is understandable, but it is misguided. First, the role of theconcept of aesthetic autonomy in literary modernism still needs con-siderable clarifi cation, and second, it is Riding’s poetics, above all, that can clarify for us what “autonomy,” with respect to literary works, couldactually mean. The will to achieve a condition of autonomy directedall of Riding’s strenuous thinking about poetry, and her evolving poet-ics are a signifi cant feature of the complex of modernist thought. Todetail her poetics, moreover, is not to impose constraints on the read-ing of her poetry. In her attempt to ground the value of poetry securely,Riding developed the idea of autonomy to an extreme, but it does not follow that her poems are “autonomous.” “Autonomy,” with respect to

13 McGann opens his discussion of Riding with a neat summary of the decline of poetry’s fortunes vis-à-vis truth telling: “Whereas once it was imagined that any con-ceptual content was open to transmission through poetry . . . since the seventeenth century this view has undergone a precipitous decline. The Kantian compromise, which ‘saved’ the possibility of poetry by severing it from any obligations to referen-tial truth, can now be seen as a clear signal that poetic discourse had come to face a deep cultural crisis. . . . At best it could be seen as a stately pleasure dome or Derrid-ian jouissance, at worst an irrelevance or distraction” (122).

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literature, can indicate a way of thinking about the writing of it, or anassumption or a theory brought to the reading of it, but it is never—it cannot be, for all that Riding wished it could—an intrinsic conditiontof a text.

The Autonomous Poem

The concept of autonomy is generally used without clarifi cation. Some-times the term serves as a synonym for intricate formal coherence (thewell-wrought urn); sometimes it designates one of a number of distinct ideas about poetry. A survey of the critical writings of modernist poetswill turn up various statements that seem to assert something likeautonomy for poetry. These statements issue from attempts to defi nethe value of poetry by preventing it from being explained reductively (as an “expression” of an individual psyche or a “refl ection” of a cul-ture) or justifi ed instrumentally (as morally uplifting or socially con-solidating). They will be found to claim only that poetry is indepen-dent of one or two particular practices or phenomena, most commonly discursive thought (Williams, sometimes Stevens) or the personality or psychology of the poet (Eliot). It is in fact diffi cult to imagine how poetry could be conceived of as autonomous tout court. Riding alonedevoted herself to the task.

Between 1927 and 1928 Riding published three books composedin varying degrees of literary history, literary criticism, cultural criti-cism, aesthetic theory, and polemic. A Survey of Modernist Poetry (y 1927),Contemporaries and Snobs (s 1928), and Anarchism is Not Enough (h 1928) areprimarily defenses of poetry—defenses against the misunderstandingsof the reading public, the presumption of critics, and the alleged mal-practice of other poets. But, above all, they defend poetry against theempirical model of knowledge.

Riding’s argument with empiricism is that as a model of knowledgeit precludes all other models of knowledge and so, necessarily, of truth.In the scientifi c model, truth has no relation to a distinctive speaker;the decisive criterion for a true statement is that it is impersonal, itsproof being (at least in principle) replicable by anyone and everyone.Thus the fi rst casualty of the scientifi c monopoly is the claim to truth


of any individual, or subjective, “sense of life.”14 Riding did not respondby retreating to a notion of “poetic” or “personal” truth. Contemporaries and Snobs opens with the declaration that “there is a sense of life so realsthat it becomes the sense of something more real than life”; “it is, at itsclearest, poetry” and “can in its origins be only a personal one” (CS, 9).Though in its origins personal, the truth of poetry, Riding claims, iss thetruth; it is true for everyone. The truth uncovered in a poem is not “a kind of truth, since in truth there are no kinds.”d 15

In these three books Riding comes to identify poetry with indi-viduality, and her defense of poetry becomes an argument for theautonomous authority of the individual mind as against the system-based authority of science. Throughout her work Riding treats scienceand society as aspects of a single force—as extensions of one another insofar as they are equally inimical to individual thought and expres-sion16—and in this way it is not just poetry that comes to be conceivedof as radically disjoined from the social and historical world, but thepoet as well. Riding forges a conception of poetic autonomy intendedto hold poetry and the poet beyond the epistemological dominion of science in particular and the social world in general. Her idea of anautonomous truth leads her to a conception of an autonomous life:

14 Laura Riding,4 Contemporaries and Snobs (London: Cape,s 1928), 9; hereafter cited as CS.

15 The Poems of Laura Riding: A Newly Revised Edition of the 1938/1980 Collection(New York: Persea, 2001), 484; hereafter cited as PLR.

16 In this belief Riding is close to Wyndham Lewis, who wrote that “whatever sci-ence might, or has in some men’s hands, become, or fundamentally is, it is undoubt-edly recognized today as the expression of the aggregate or crowd” (Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards [Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1993], 300). Riding met Lewis in London, through Robert Graves. For a short time she and Lewis appear to have recognized in each other something of a common spirit. Lewis wrote to her in 1927 to request an account of her “career” (a term she treated with irony in her response). He solicited poems from her for publication in The Enemy; Riding and Graves solicited work from him for publication by Seizin Press. Lewis, like Riding, identifi ed the problem of art in the early twentieth century as the problem of indi-viduality, and that of individuality as the problem of preserving intellectual indepen-dence. But well before Riding’s ship drew into London from New York, Lewis had begun the work of trying to prove and to preserve the sovereignty of his mind by mastering what Riding would soon dismiss as “the machinery of knowledge” (A, 43).

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the concept of poetic autonomy, rigorously pursued, transmuted into a postulate of radical existential isolation. That position was for Riding intellectually and creatively unsustainable; when she withdrew from it,she relinquished poetry as well.

Written in collaboration with Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetrypresents itself as a guide undertaken for the sake of the “plain reader.”Riding and Graves offer an explanation of the creation of poems that are “not only diffi cult in construction and reference” but (in a further affront to the public) “printed queerly on the page.”17 Their explicationof modernist poetics involves two conceptions of the relationship of poetry to the general life and thought of a society. One is the relatively conventional conception that poetry and society infl uence each other;the other conceives of poetry as only incidentally connected to the soci-ety it issues from. These conceptions coexist in the book without obtru-sive incompatibility, but the second logically overrides the fi rst and isthe beginning of the radical conception of poetic autonomy that Rid-ing develops in Contemporaries and Snobs ands Anarchism Is Not Enough.

Riding and Graves’s analyses of the mechanics of some repre-sentative modernist poems imply a model of poetry that had generalcurrency among modernists. According to this model, modernism inpoetry (and in the arts in general) is a force of perceptual and psycho-logical renewal. By implication, art is understood as an encoding of cul-tural perception that can, however, ossify what should be a continualand dynamic process of cultural evolution. The upheaval of modernist poetics is therefore understood as an effort to demonstrate to the con-temporary mind its unconscious and restrictive habits and to encodein new poems what is genuinely contemporary in the life and thought

17 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: Heine-ymann, 1927), 59; hereafter cited as S. Riding and Graves, it should be noted, do not offer an unqualifi ed justifi cation of modernist practice. Throughout the book they distinguish a genuine from a false modernism, and the fi nal chapter shifts from explanatory defense to, roughly, the “season of failures and fragments” line that Vir-ginia Woolf takes in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” In their conclusion they cast modernist poetics as an aesthetically necessary but temporary convulsion, signifying a period of diffi cult historical adjustment whose contortions will give way to a less con-fl icted verbal art: “The next stage is not clear. But it is not impossible that there will be a resumption of less eccentric, less strained, more critically unconscious poetry, puri-fi ed however by this experience of historical effort” (264–65).


of the culture. “Modern life,” Riding and Graves write, “is full of thestock-feelings and situations with which traditional poetry has continu-ally fed popular sentiments”; “it must be realized that it is always thepoets who are the real psychologists, that it is they who break downantiquated literary defi nitions of people’s feelings and make them or try to make them self-conscious about formerly ignored or obscuremental processes. . . . [Poetry] is not trying to say ‘Things often felt but ne’er so well expressed’ but to discover what it is we are really feeling”(S, 90). The techniques of modernist poetry, the argument goes, arecontrived in the attempt to achieve greater accuracy of psychologicalexpression.

The second conception of poetry that Riding and Graves develop,however, is much less accepting of a place for poetry in the intellectuallife of society. It postulates “poetic thought” as a distinct activity of themind. Empiricism’s implicit challenge to poetry is the question What does poetry give us knowledge ofo ? Riding and Graves’s conception of poeticthought appears to have been produced under a sense of compulsion toanswer that question, but it does so only by relating poetry to alterna-tive but inscrutable notions of cognition and truth.

While denouncing the (alleged) imagist practice of using “images‘to render particulars exactly,’” Riding and Graves write that a goodpoem—a real poem—“does not give a rendering of a poetical pictureor idea existing outside the poem, but presents the literal substanceof poetry, a newly created thought-activity” (S, 118).18 The claim is dif-fi cult to parse, but it appears to predicate two things: fi rst, that poetry does not “render” (or describe, or express) things that exist indepen-dently of it; and second, that poetry (the composing and, presumably,the reading of it) is cognitive in nature (“thought-activity” is its sub-

18 Riding and Graves’s emphasis on the cognitive nature of poetry and their opposition to visually oriented poetics (and, elsewhere, to musically oriented poet-ics) are in a sense two sides of the same coin. They are above all concerned to defi ne the cognitive nature of poetry, and their devaluation of aspects of poetry that could be termed sensual is the consequence of that concern. The fi rst chapter of Surveypresses the point: “The poem is not the paper, not the type, not the spoken syllables. It is as invisible and as inaudible as thought; and the only method that the real poet is interested in using is one that will present the poem without making it either visible or audible, without turning it into a substitute for a picture or for music” (21).

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stance).19 A similar claim surfaces later, in slightly adjusted terms. Thepoet, we are told, “discover[s] things which are made by his discovery of them (his results are not statements about things already known toexist, or knowledge, but truths, things which existed before only aspotential truth)” (S, 126–27). The key term shifts from thought-activityto truths, and this shift is reinforced by the subsequent statement that the poet “is declaring with each new poem a truth, a complete truth,even a contradictory truth” (S, 154). The sense in which truth is usedhis further obscured in a defi ant fl ourish: “[The poet] is allowing twotimes two (or truth) to become all it is possible for it to be, since truthcannot be reduced to a fi xed mathematical law any more than poetry toa fi xed literary method: two times two, like poetry, may be everything and anything” (S, 154).

Truth is a concept that Riding and Graves evidently wish to makeproblematic but do not wish to relinquish: they are resolved to wrest back from the science the epistemological cachet of the term. They want to claim for poetry a truth-value equal to that of science but not subject to evaluation by science. In trying to secure this status for poetry, they arrive at an early formulation of the later famous heresy of paraphrase.To the plain reader’s demand of the modernist poem, “‘What, in somany words . . . is this all about?’” they answer that “if it were possibleto give the complete force of a poem in a prose summary, then therewould be no excuse for writing the poem: the ‘so many words’ are, tothe last punctuation mark, the poem itself” (S, 139).20 The true poemis not just semantically irreducible but inexpandable:

19 By cognitive here I mean “pertaining to the mental processes of perception, ememory, judgment, and reasoning, as contrasted with emotional and volitional pro-cesses” (Random House Webster’s College Dictionary [y 1992]).

20 The indebtedness of New Criticism’s analytic technique to Riding and Graves, via William Empson, has been fairly widely acknowledged, though the issue is mired in the controversy over the collaborative authorship of Survey. In his preface to the fi rst edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson acknowledged his debt to the analysis of a Shakespeare sonnet in Survey but cited Graves alone as the author. Prompted by yRiding’s protest, he acknowledged the coauthorship in the second edition. Later he rescinded the credit, however, writing that “[Graves] is, so far as I know, the inven-tor of the method of analysis I am using here” (Seven Types of Ambiguity, 2nd ed., rev. [London: Chatto and Windus, 1947], xiv). Though Survey had appeared with the ystatement that the book was a “word-by-word” collaboration, in 1966 Graves claimed full credit for the analytic method worked out in it. Riding publicly retaliated in the


If, as such, without the addition of any associations not provided in the poem, or of collateral interpretations, [a poem] could reveal an inter-nal consistency strengthened at every point in its development and free of the necessity of external application, that is, complete without criti-cism—if it could do this, it would have established an insurmountable difference between prose ideas and poetic ideas, prose facts and poetic facts. The difference would mean the independence of poetic facts, as real facts, from any prose or poetical explanation in the terms of practi-cal workaday reality which would make them seem unreal, or poetical facts. (S, 146)

Raiding the prestigious vocabulary of science a second time, Riding and Graves return with “fact,” claiming for poetry a “real” factuality independent of the “prose facts” of “practical workaday reality.” Thisis a true assertion of poetic autonomy, not because it claims that poetry is not paraphrasable but because it claims that to write or read poetry isto partake of a different reality. The claim is not systematically pursuedin A Survey of Modernist Poetry; in Riding’s subsequent work, however, it becomes entrenched and uncompromising.

Poetry and History

Between A Survey of Modernist Poetry andy Contemporaries and Snobs we canstrace a line of argument that fortifi es the claim for poetic autonomy by maintaining that the history of poetry is essentially independent of thehistory of the societies from which it issues. In both Survey andy Contem-

Modern Language Quarterly in y 1971 and in the Denver Quarterly iny 1974. As early as 1964, however, in a commentary on Survey to be included with the Cornell Library’s copy of ythe book, she stated that “I am the originator of the technique of linguistic examina-tion—the pressing upon each word in its place in its relation to the others—appliedin the book to the Shakespeare sonnet (and evident elsewhere in it), and adopted by William Empson for his lifelong use as his critical methodology (a methodology that distorted the technique into speculative improvisations)” (“Commentary by Laura Rid-ing on A Survey of Modernist Poetry,” ts. 95-23, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY).Wexler notes that some critics trace the origin of New Critical method to the Fugitives, but Riding claims that she infl uenced them, not vice versa. See Deborah Baker, In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (New York: Grove,g 1993), 139–44; Adams, 25–26; and Joyce Piell Wexler, Laura Riding’s Pursuit of Truth (Athens: Ohio University Press,h1979), 14–15. That the heresy of paraphrase is worked out at length in chapter 6 of Survey, however, has not been recognized.

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poraries Riding criticizes the Eliotic hypostasis of literary history as a sseries of “monuments [that] form an ideal order among themselves,”21

but the conception of poetry that she develops denies the relevanceof historical conditions more radically than anything Eliot meant tosuggest.

One axiom of Survey is that the place of poetry in the life of contem-yporary society is negligible: “Poetry, which was once an all-embracing human activity, has been narrowed down by the specialization of other general activities, such as religion and the arts and sciences, into a tech-nical branch of culture of the most limited kind. It has changed froma ‘humanity’ into an ‘art’” (S, 260). Riding and Graves see this situa-tion as responsible for the hypertrophy of literary criticism and for thedistinctly modernist conception of the poetic tradition as a “communalpoetic mind which sits over the individual poet whenever he writes”(S, 264).22 Because “society allows less and less space for poetry in itsorganization,” poetry has contracted to a mere “dot on the period’stime chart” (S, 261): “The only way that this dot . . . can provide itself with artifi cial dignity and space is through historical depth. . . . it must extend this dot into the past, it must make a historical straight line of it. Poetry becomes the tradition of poetry. The tradition of poetry . . .then, is the formal organisation which the modernist poet fi nds him-self serving as an affi liated member” (S, 261). In these circumstances,“the poet has no longer to make adjustment [sic] to his social environ-ment . . . but [must make] critical adjustments to a special tradition of poetic values” (S, 262). This last objection may appear to prod poetsto occupy themselves more with their immediate “social environment”and less with their dead predecessors. But in fact Riding and Graves donot object to the abstraction of poetry from social history. The prin-cipal fault of Eliot’s conception of the poetic tradition, as they see it,is not that it is asocial but that it is l professionalized—and therefore not asocial enough.

21 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen; New York: Barnes and Noble, m 1960), 49–50.

22 Riding and Graves appear to be paraphrasing Eliot’s image of the poet writing “not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (49).


Poetry in past ages, Riding and Graves imagine, was fully integratedwith the life of its society: “In primitive societies . . . [it] went hand inhand with magical religion” (S, 260); in imperial and religious societiesit “met certain demands that were laid upon [it] by an environment inwhich [it was] generously included” (CS, 126); it served as “an interpre-tation and mirror of life” (S, 167). While there is a discernible nostalgia in this account, Riding for the most part portrays the old mirroring-and-interpreting role of poetry as a set of shackles from which it hasrecently been released. One of her most stringent criticisms of modern-ist poetry is precisely its preoccupation with contemporary social lifeand thought, and she repeatedly arraigns contemporary criticism for “return[ing] poetry to its primitive ritualistic function of community revelation” by treating it as “the generalized voice of social sentiment”rather than as “an independent personal attribute” (CS, 83). Thus inSurvey she and Graves explain:y

A strong distinction must be drawn between poetry as something devel-oping through civilization and as something developing organically by itself . . . a complete and separate form of energy which is neither more nor less in the twentieth century A.D. than in the tenth century B.C. . . . It is therefore always important to distinguish between what is histori-cally new in poetry because the poet is contemporary with a civilization of a certain kind, and what is intrinsically new in poetry because the poet is a new and original individual, something more than a mere servant and interpreter of civilization. (S, 163)

Riding wanted to dissociate poetry from history because she could not fi nd a way around seeing a historical poetry as an intellectually servilepoetry. If poetry is understood as an “interpreter of civilization,” shefelt, then it is no more than an “inspired drudge” to “the corpus of knowledge” (CS, 61) or “a graceful tribute to the triumph of the con-crete intelligence” (CS, 20)—that is, to the scientifi c status quo.23 ThusRiding construes poetry’s former social functions as “pseudo-poeticoccupations” and its loss of them as the sign of its arrival at the con-dition that has been poetry’s “unconscious desire . . . since its begin-nings” (CS, 22, 24). In its scientifi c vanity, twentieth-century civilization

23 Riding defi nes “the concrete intelligence,” to which she opposes poetry or “the poetic intelligence,” as the faculty that “regards everything as potentially com-prehensible and measurable” (CS, 19).

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tells poetry “that it cannot keep up with it, that it must disappear” (S,167), but this rude dismissal is in fact “the liberation of the poetic intel-ligence from its indenture” (CS, 24). Yet if the twentieth century liber-ated poetry from its social obligations, its obligations to what Riding calls the “knowledge-material” of the age (CS, 57), then what exactly was poetry left so free to do?

Poetry and the Self

There are some grounds for suggesting that if Riding cannot see a way for poetry to coexist with the empirical model of knowledge, it is because her perception of science and its ramifi cations tends to besimplistic, largely following the commonplaces of the antiscientifi crhetoric of the day. At times her critique amounts to little more thanan appropriation of the contested terms of value. Thus “poetry is thescience of reality, so-called science is itself the myth” (CS, 86), and theknowledge of the “concrete intelligence” is only “the illusion of knowl-edge” (CS, 19). Riding does not distinguish pure experimental sciencefrom disastrous applications and distorted popularizations of science(“Modern warfare is . . . [one] aspect of the decay of science, ‘scientifi c’spiritualism another” [CS, 85]), nor does she evince an awareness of thesciences’ own interrogation of their epistemological underpinnings.

But whatever unsettling ideas issue from science’s inner circles, theempirical model of knowledge, Anthony Giddens argues, is, like allthe constitutive dimensions of modernity, “inherently globalizing.”24

The predictive power of science gives it a universalizing force fromwhich neither traditional nor alternative conceptions of knowledge andtruth can remain entirely autonomous. It is to this condition that Rid-ing refers when she says that “knowledge, mad with its own modernity,declared itself the sole source of truth” (CS, 62). When she writes that “if the poet shows independence, is, indeed, not a mere mouthpiece of the contemporary mind . . . everything he writes is taken with a grain of scientifi c salt” (CS, 58), she identifi es not just the condition of the poet in the twentieth century but the condition of everyone. Trust in expert

24 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-yversity Press, 1990), 63.


systems is a constitutive feature of modernity, and “no one,” as Giddensputs it, “can completely opt out” (84). Riding cannot see room for inde-pendence of mind—and therefore for poetry—in such a framework;independence has to be independence from it.m

Riding undertakes to legitimate “personal authority” (CS, 10) by postulating something like an antiframework of meaning. Knowledgeiisystematized is knowledge falsifi ed: “Any system of knowledge . . . hasas much inconsistency as there is inconsistency in humanity at that moment; which is just why a system of knowledge is a philosophical tyr-manny and a historical falsehood” (CS, 118). The only knowledge we canhave is what is produced by “erratic humanity and the perceptive intel-ligence” (CS, 119). But this attempt to secure for poets an authority not subject to scientifi c evaluation comes close to collapsing into relativism,to undermining all authority. What recourse, then, did Riding have?l

As early as Survey Riding linked the devaluation of poetry to theydenigration of the individual, identifying both as results of the impla-cable logic of science and its fusion of “truth” with “objectivity.” In a sci-entifi c society, what is “individual” is “subjective” and therefore, almost by defi nition, untrue, unreal. By the time Riding wrote Anarchism Is Not Enough, she had made a virtue of necessity. She identifi es poetry with individuality and locates both in “unreality,” a space or dimen-sion incommensurable with what is socially designated as reality: “Theunreal to me is poetry”; it is “the individual himself” (A, 69).

Riding begins to defi ne poetry in opposition to all that is knowablein the ordinary sense, all that is sociohistorical, shareable, communi-cable—in opposition to everything that is, to use one of her centralterms, something. “A poem,” she fi nally declares, “is nothing”: “By persis-ggtence the poem can be made something, but then it is something, not a poem” (A, 16). She is not, however, relinquishing poetry’s claim totruth; she is rejecting the term of value, something, as a debased linguis-ggtic counter, no longer capable of signifying its true object, and is adopt-ing its opposite term, nothing, for that purpose.gg She uses the same strat-egy to return to real and l reality what she claims is their original, their ytrue, meaning: “It is painful . . . to be forced to leave ‘poetry’ to thereal self and to call the poetry of the unreal self unreality. Poetry is a stolen word, and in using it one must remain conscious of its pervertedsense in the service of realism; and this is equally painful. But if poetry

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is a stolen word, so is reality: reality is stolen from the self, which is thusin its integrity forced to call itself unreal” (A, 80).25 Riding wants tosecure for the poet, or for poetry as a mode of language (she does not distinguish clearly between them), the autonomous authority to makestatements about or, in some other way, to access or apprehend reality.But reality how conceived? How can reality be “the individual himself”eand yet be more than the experiential “reality” of a given self? For Rid-ing even attempts to sever the term self from any particular self: a truefpoem is “discharged from the individual”; “it is self; not his self, but self” (A, 97). Her conception of the relationship of poetry to reality andtruth undergoes a distinct shift at this point. The truth that she beginsto associate with poetry comes to have less to do with the accurateapprehension of reality and more to do with a way of being.

Here and there in Anarchism Is Not Enough, particularly in the sec-tions preceding the centerpiece essay, “Jocasta,” Riding retains knowl-edge as a term of value to be secured on behalf of poetry. But when, inethe opening paragraphs of “Jocasta,” she claims that “to be right is tobe incorruptibly individual. To be wrong is to be righteously collec-tive” (A, 42), she has shifted her ground. Right in this context does not tmean “correct”; it means something closer to “authentic”—as does, ulti-mately, her term unreal. The essay’s key words (in their inverted senses)are reality and y unreality. “Truth” becomes existential; it means living incognizant and faithful accord with one’s essential nature.

“Jocasta” culminates in the claim that from the point at whichhuman groups distinguished themselves from roving animal packsthe idea of the social group has been a lie imposed by force, and theessential nature of every human being has been a radical individual-ity, a not-belonging to anything but itself. Thus the systematization of knowledge and the orientation toward being it results in belie the truehuman condition. All systems of knowledge represent a culpably nos-talgic desire to give the individual mind up to a collective one. “But what is the collective mind? A herd of deer clinging together may be

25 By the same logic, Riding uses the words literature and e literary as pejorative yterms. In one of the short pieces preceding the essay “Jocasta,” she instructs the would-be writer “how not to write literature” (A, 20); in “Jocasta” itself, she elabo-rates: “Literature is everything but the unreal self, it is the society of reality; it is His-tory, it is Nature, it is Philosophy, it is Reason, it is Criticism, it is Art” (A, 80–81).


said to have unanimity, but it can scarcely be said to have a mind: it has unanimity because to the extent to which it clings together it isbrutish, natural reality. And the same is true of primitive man up tothe point where individual works of art occur” (A, 111). Collectivity is a trait of animal life; “man . . . lives unto himself not as a species but as anindividual” (A, 64).26 Insofar as one lives rightly, as an individual, onelives in “unreality,” unconstrained by the collective constructions of history and society and the discursive modes by which they are formedand perpetuated. Riding’s “version of individual authority,” Samuelsobserves, “is an absolute spiritual imperative, compared to which themore common Western ideology of personal liberty is but a temporalshadow” (A, xxxi). Riding faults even the archindividualist WyndhamLewis, one of the few contemporaries with whom she felt a degree of sympathy, for not being intellectually bold enough “to separate the fact of individuality from the fact of sociality and reveal how they maintainthemselves in one person through a contradiction, not through ‘rea-son’” (A, 124).27 Lewis, she concludes, is (in her idiosyncratic senseof the term) merely an “anarchist.” The enigmatic, if catchy, title of her book resolves itself here: anarchism is the pursuit of individuality within the framework of social reality, and anarchism is not enough.True individuality is “unreal,” and “its just conclusion is a sort of socialdisappearance” (A, 75).

26 In Riding’s poem “Yes and No,” humanity appears, a little comically, as “an animal unzoological,” “Without a fate, without a fact, / Its private history intact / Against the travesty / Of an anatomy” (PLR, 18).

27 Lewis does not speak of individuality and sociality as existing in contradiction, exactly, but he does speak of them as existing in fi erce tension: “We live a conscious and magnifi cent life of the ‘mind’ at the expense of [the] community. . . . But in sympathy with the political movements today, the tendency of scientifi c thought (in which is included philosophic thought) is to hand back to this vast community of cells this stolen, aristocratical monopoly of personality which we call the ‘mind’” (Time and Western Man, 299). Riding’s broader objection to Lewis is that his impassioned defense of the individual against the homogenizing forces of modernity is corrupted by his devotion to reasoned argumentation. Though Lewis’s works are by no means as systematic as Riding suggests, it is true that the rationalist in him made him commit-ted at least in theory to the promise of reasoned public discourse. For Lewis’s amused and bemused response to Riding’s conclusions about him see The Diabolical Principle, and The Dithyrambic Spectator (London: Chatto and Windus, r 1931), 153–55.

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The Poems of Laura Riding

Riding’s arrival at this conception of radical autonomy—at once poeticand existential—was not the end of her poetry, however, but the begin-ning. When Anarchism Is Not Enough went to press in h 1928, she had pub-lished only one volume of poems, The Close Chaplet (t 1926). Four morefollowed in the next fi ve years, and 1938 saw the retrospective collec-tion The Poems of Laura Riding, into which she also integrated new work.ggHer sense of the acute antagonism of the individual and the collectivewas exceptionally productive.

Riding’s poetry, though maligned by some of her prominent con-temporaries (Virginia Woolf, Louis MacNeice), was lauded by enoughothers (Allen Tate and the other Fugitives, Kenneth Rexroth, Yeats) toprevent her from becoming, as K. K. Ruthven described her in 1991, “a fi gure almost everybody connected with literary studies has heard of but nobody feels obliged to read.”28 The near disappearance of Riding’spoetry after midcentury was, Ruthven demonstrates, partly a result of modernist literary politics but to a much greater extent a result of her own withdrawal of her work from circulation.29 At least since Persea Books fi rst reissued The Poems of Laura Riding in g 1980, however, her work has been generally available. It appears, then, that doubts about it persist, and I do not think that they can be largely accounted for, asRuthven suggests, by its incompatibilities with the paradigms of liter-ary academics. Riding’s resolve to forge an autonomous poetry issuedin the austerity and analytic intellection for which her work has beenjustly recognized. It is also responsible, however, for her poetry’s great-est liability, which is neither the “diffi culty” nor the “abstraction” towhich many contemporary critics objected but the closed conceptualcircle in which the poems sometimes move.

Riding faced the charge of “diffi culty” so often from mystifi edreviewers of her volumes of poetry that she felt compelled to addressit in her 1938 preface to The Poems of Laura Riding. “As a poet who hasgg

28 K. K. Ruthven, “How to Avoid Being Canonized: Laura Riding,” Textual Prac-tice 5 (1991): 243–60.

29 “It has been [the] refusal to relinquish critical authority over her writing,” Jo-Ann Wallace similarly argues, “which has led both to her excision from ‘the canon’ and to her continued invisibility in the construction of revisionist canons” (“Laura Riding and the Politics of Decanonization,” American Literature 64 [1992]: 120).


been persistently accused of ‘diffi culty,’” she writes frankly, “I feel that there is due from me an explanation of the baffl ing effect that my poems apparently have for a large number of readers” (PLR, 482). Diffi -culty, a common enough feature of modernist poetry, has proved rather to recommend poems for canonization than to disqualify them fromit. Riding’s volumes, however, include poems whose opacity remainsunresolved after repeated readings and is unredeemed by other attrac-tions.30 This tendency to be cryptic seems to be underwritten by her supreme confi dence that the poet’s linguistic discipline accesses a uni-versal, and hence universally comprehensible, truth. Thus the promis-ing overture in her preface stops short with the explanation that thepoems, if approached with the requisite interest in truth, are not in fact diffi cult: “No reader who goes to poetry for the right reasons shouldfi nd them anything but lucid” (PLR, 484). There are, then, some Rid-ing poems that even goodwilled readers will fi nd impenetrable, nor willthe preface be of practical assistance.

For the majority of her poems, however, the charge of diffi culty does not hold, and in many cases it may be, or was originally, an inexact formulation of the other common frustration with her poetry. BothAdams and Wexler fi nd in Riding’s work a certain “abstraction,” whichresults from her claim for the poet’s autonomous authority. She left sci-ence to the scientists, history to the historians, sociology to the sociolo-gists, and images, for the most part, to the painters. In her work, loca-tions and embodiments are stripped away; many of her poems become,as Wexler puts it, “a record of her mind being aware of itself” (40).They trace the involutions of self-consciousness:

Thought looking out on thoughtMakes one an eye.One is the mind self-blind,The other is thought goneTo be seen from afar and not known. (PLR, 91)

30 John Ashbery, writing of his indebtedness to Riding, offers a memorable anat-omy of one such poem, one of the “Sonnets in Memory of Samuel.” “Wexler’s study,” he notes, “includes many painstaking exegeses of the poems,” but he confesses that “I fi nd most of these as diffi cult to follow as the poems themselves” (Other Traditions[Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000], 108–11, 104).

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They also revolve around the perplexities of language:

But how to mean more closelyIf the sun shines but approximately?What a world of awkwardness!What hostile implements of sense! (PLR, 198)

Some readers perhaps, after a while with Riding’s poetry, will start tomiss the tangible world. Much of her work is noumenal in this way; it isnot, however, obscure.

Riding’s resolve to secure poetic authority, moreover, does not confi ne her to epistemology and semantics. Her attentiveness to theprocesses of the mind neither excludes nor simplifi es its passions andconfl icts. She could etch in steel the paradox of human union anddivision:

Take hands.There is no love now.But there are hands.There is no joining now,But a joining has beenOf the fastening of fi ngersAnd their opening.More than the clasp even, the kissSpeaks loneliness,How we dwell apart,And how love triumphs in this. (PLR, 23)

The sole tangibles are hands and fi ngers, but the sequence of verbs(joining, gg fastening, gg opening) and the gently halted pace communicateggthe surge and lapse of physical intensity along with its psychologicalparadox. Contact heightens rather than diminishes the awareness of boundaries; the more intimate the contact, the keener the divide. Yet the unbreachable separateness brings love, the desire to breach thoseboundaries, into being.

The powerful starkness of poems like “Take Hands” cannot beentirely attributed to Riding’s concentration on defi ning the scope of poetic authority. Most of her poems were written after 1925, when theinitial blasts of imagism and vorticism had come and gone; she ben-


efi ted from those early efforts to produce a poetry that was, as Poundput it in 1918, “austere, direct, free from emotional slither.”31 She didnot originate the century’s chiseled lines, subtle cadences, and covert rhymes; her rigorous development of them, however, seems to havebeen driven by her will to ground the truth-telling claims of poetry in its mastery of verbal semantics. For instance, we can compare “TakeHands” to Stevens’s treatment of a similar theme, “Re-statement of Romance”:

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.It is what it is as I am what I am:And in perceiving this I best perceive myself.

And you. Only we two may interchangeEach in each other what each has to give.Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of ourselves,Supremely true to each separate self,In the pale light that each upon the other throws.32

The two poets’ measured cerebrations sometimes recall each other;here, however, compared to Riding’s, the great sensualist’s poem seemsindirect, even attenuated by abstraction. Stevens makes a symbol of “night,” using it to conjure the backdrop of the vast indifferent cosmosin order to deepen the impression of human isolation. Riding concen-trates on the literal force of the word; her simple denotation of thetouch that connects and the release that parts renders such staging superfl uous. The extreme spareness and brevity of her lines alone reg-ister an encompassing cosmic silence.

In fact, it was from Riding, rather than from Pound, that many English poets of the 1930s got, in Kenner’s phrase, their “specifi cationsfor technical hygiene.”33 Deborah Baker cites both Geoffrey Grigson’s

31 “A Retrospect,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 14.32 The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage,s 1990), 146.33 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, a 1971),

186.

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and Julian Symons’s testimonials to Riding’s infl uence. Symons recalledthat in addition to Auden, on whom Riding’s infl uence was “obviousand profound,” “many other poets benefi ted, some of them indirectly,from . . . her utter elimination of what she called in one letter to me‘marzipan’ and in another ‘the luxury-stab we are taught to look for at school’” (Baker, 350–51).

Riding’s tortuous conclusion that both poem and poet must exist in a space outside social reality did not, then, produce a poetry unin-telligible in the terms of her age. In many respects, she continued thereforms of poetic language that had been launched in the fi rst decadeof the century and fostered, by example, their further development.Her long preoccupation with the issue of poetic authority, however,did evolve into a conceptual framework that uncomfortably constrainsa number of her poems. Very early in her career Riding developed theconviction that it is by means of the poet’s linguistic labors that bothpoets and their readers apprehend (ultimately, dwell in) truth. Thisconception of a truth accessed through poetry alone grew into an apoc-alyptic vision of human division, strife, and mendacity returning toan original condition of unity and truth. This vision was articulated at length many years later in her “personal evangel,” The Telling.gg 34 Thedetails of the vision are vague; it has neither the architecture of a politicalutopia nor the scenery of an afterlife. It does not entail a transcendenceof physical, embodied life, but it is to issue from “a fi nal, irrevocable,ridding of the self of all with which it is substanced as a centre of socialidentity” (T,TT 104). Each of us will then become “a representative of that One, a speaker of the whole truth, truth rescued from the unintegrat-able, diverse narratives of being sounding within each human locale”(T,TT 105). The Telling is a product of the years after Riding had turnedgaway from poetry, but the apocalyptic vision it articulates was fi rst devel-oped in her poetry and forms, I believe, its most signifi cant limitation.

One example of this constraint can be seen in her analyses of gender. The transformation of gender relations is an integral part of Riding’s vision of progress toward a condition of truth, and she exam-

34 The Telling was fi rst published in the journal g Chelsea in May a 1967. With fur-ther commentary by Riding, it was published as a book by Athlone Press in 1972. All references to The Telling are to that edition, hereafter cited asg T.TT


ined gender and sexuality at length in essays as well as in her poetry.35

She came to her writing with an acute and pained awareness of just how much of literary history stands revealed, to disenchanted eyes, as“men’s private play with [women] in public” (quoted in Heuving, 202).Many of her poems portray female self-consciousness restive and unde-ceived beneath the “patriarchal leer” (PLR, 267). In “Auspice of Jewels”Riding writes:

We are studded with wide brillianceAs the world with towns and cities—The travelling look builds capitalsWhere the evasive eye may restSafe from the too immediate lodgement. (PLR, 277)

The poem begins by construing the traditional adornments of womenas the condensation and displacement of raw masculine desire: orna-mentation both masks and symbolizes “the dark of fl esh-love” (PLR,277). Elaborate costuming is a form of confi nement: “We must despoilthe drowsy masquerade,” the poem urges; “glossy dazed adornments”have rendered us “forgeries of ourselves” (PLR, 278). Riding’s oftenilluminating explorations of the ruses and guises of sexual power, how-ever, tend to be cut short by the apocalyptic vision that was their ulti-mate referent. Gender differences for Riding, as Heuving and Samu-els note, were not to be redefi ned but abolished. Thus the ingeniousopening metaphor of “Auspice of Jewels” gives way to a declaration of latter-day transcendence:

For we are now otherwise luminous.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .We have passed from plaintive visibilityInto total rareness,And from this reunion of ourselves and themUnder the snuffed lantern of time

35 Riding began to write on gender at length in the early 1930s, in a book with the working title The Word Woman. When the Spanish Civil War forced her and Graves to leave their residence in Deyá in 1936, the manuscript was left behind; it was not returned to her until 1974. Edited by Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan Clark, it was fi nally published in 1993 by Persea Books as The Word Woman and Other Related Writings.

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36 Feminist interest in Riding might have begun at least twenty years ago; Riding herself is the main reason that it never gained momentum. She considered women spiritually superior to men because of their long history of what Samuels calls “the privilege of alienation”: “Their relatively nonpublic, unempowered status has given them unique access to the realms of the individual unreal” (xxxiv–xxxv). But Rid-ing was convinced that the transcendence of gender differences was both possible and enecessary; she was hostile to anything that looked like gender-based identity forma-tion. She refused to allow her work to be included in anthologies of women’s writing. Ruthven, who tells the story of Riding’s self-exclusion well, catalogs the academic studies of modernism and feminism, from about 1979 to 1990, in which Riding might well have been included but was not. Nonetheless Ruthven concludes that Rid-ing “wrote feminist poems no matter how resistant she is to being labeled feminist” (255); Heuving’s work proceeds on this basis, as does Jane Dowson’s short section on Riding in her Women, Modernism, and British Poetry, 1910–1939: Resisting Femininity(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 152–58. Wallace suggests that feminist silence on the subject of Riding indicates that “feminist theory . . . has not yet thought through its own disciplining of ‘diffi cult women’” (123).

Comes an astonished fl ash like truth. . . . (PLR, 278)

If there is one thing that will dispose history to be unkind to Riding, it is her too frequent declarations that history is over. We manifestly arenot now “otherwise luminous,” or are just barely so, and the “lantern of time” simply has not been “snuffed.” Riding’s feminism is responsiblefor some of the recent interest in her work, but her peremptory posi-tion on the ultimate fate of gender relations means that her work hasanalytic but not constructive value.36

Apocalypticism is by no means a meager theme for poetry, nor didit discord with the age, or indeed the century, that would express itself again and again in the images of “Slouching towards Bethlehem.” Inmany poems Riding’s own vision does fi nd memorable articulation.“Doom in Bloom,” for instance, merges wavering human will withineluctable organic process; transformation begins as a slow subter-ranean force:

Now fl ower the oldest seeds.The secret of the root no moreKeeps jealous distance from the air.The dark intent, so lothfully [sic] ascending,At last to resolution grows;. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .The lone defi ance blossoms failure,


But risk of all by all beguilesFate’s wreckage into similar smiles. (PLR, 360–61)

Two things primarily distinguish Riding’s sense of an ending fromYeats’s. First, her vision of the end of what she calls in this poem the“cruel compacted silence / From which unlovable centuries sprang”(PLR, 360) does not entail cataclysm. However admirably, ingeniously articulated, therefore, her apocalyptic poems lack the nightmarishimages that allowed Yeats’s poem to speak for the century’s terrors.Riding’s vision is both more abstract in its substance and more particu-lar in its principles than Yeats’s, and some of her poems make senseonly with reference to it. The fi nal lines of “Doom in Bloom” refer toher stipulation that transformation, while imminent, must come fromthe concerted will of many toward the articulation of truth: “Lone defi -ance” will fail; transformation demands the “risk of all by all”; “fate’swreckage” is our splintered, moribund world; “similar smiles” is theunity of truth.

Second, Riding’s apocalypticism is also, in its vision of the dawn of a new age, a utopianism, which at its worst is self-righteous and intol-erant. The splenetic poem “A Need for Hell” passed her process of selection, revision, and repositioning and found a place in “Poems Con-tinual,” the fi nal section of her culminant Poems of Laura Riding:

Let there be hell again!—That virtue thought to do without,Confusing goodness with rash plenty.The evil have a right to liveIn the freedom conferred on fools.But give them back their hell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .There is not enough of the good thingsTo go round among so many.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Therefore let there be hell again.Virtue cannot herself and those maintain. (PLR, 340)

“A Need for Hell” is a quite singular lapse, yet in other poems an invidi-ous, if more controlled, severity also creeps in. “We must learn better /What we are and are not,” instructs “The Why of the Wind”:

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We must distinguish betterBetween ourselves and strangers.There is much that we are not.There is much that is not.There is much that we have not to be. (PLR, 330)

Every heaven casts a shadow called hell, and Riding’s vision of humanliving-in-truth is no different. “One must misread Riding in order to beenriched by her,” Ashbery concludes about her utopianism. “One must ignore her promises of future enlightenment, the pie in the sky whichwill turn out to be better than poetry can ever be” (119). Some of her poems, however, resist misreading; the language can be relished, but the sense demands either rejection or assent.

The story of Riding’s break with poetry after 1940 has been toldmany times, and it was in one sense a deeply egalitarian gesture. Shehad always held that the special access of poets to truth was guaranteedby their intimate relationship to language, and this inevitably renderedreaders benefi ciaries of, rather than equal partners in, the articulationor realization of truth. Ultimately, Riding’s belief “that the ability todiscover and articulate truth made man human engendered a moralneed to allow nonpoets to call themselves human too” (Wexler, 97).Poets, as Riding explained many years later, “must function as if they were people who were on the inside track of linguistic expression, peo-ple endowed with the highest language-powers,” and in so doing they “block the discovery that everyone is on this inside track.”37

Thus Riding’s decision to write no more poetry was a move towardinclusiveness. In The Telling she insists that every individual is equally gcalled to strive toward the articulation of truth. Intellectual autonomy remains an imperative, but it is extended to everyone. Humanity’s willto truth (taken as axiomatic) is conceived, in a vaguely Hegelian way,as “being” coming into fully expressed consciousness of itself. Henceevery individual’s devotion to the speaking of being will eventually con-

37 Laura Riding, “Introduction for a Broadcast,” Chelsea 12 (1962): 3, 5. Riding’s main public statement on her decision to stop writing poetry was her introduction to a British Broadcasting Corporation reading (by others) of a few of her poems in 1962. The text of that introduction was printed later in the year as “Introduction for a Broadcast,” along with a brief elaboration titled “Continued for Chelsea.”


verge with every other individual’s in an articulation of the indivisiblewhole, which is truth. “Do you speak, and u you,” Riding urges, “making our subject less mine, more yours . . . less yours, more ours” (T, TT 43).The Telling is an expression of hope and faith, not a series of laws. But ghowever vaguely imagined, the vision is predicated on a notion of unity that induces Riding to preserve a distinction between “true differencesof understanding,” which will arise in the process of articulation, andfalse differences, which will be “made jealously” by those who, clinging to their private egos, want to win and control the attention of others (T,TT55). The old need for hell is discernible in the calm new conviction that dissent is merely a “false-speaking,” which will eventually be recognizedas such and heard no more: “It will be repeated to the extinction of itscapability of seeming new, true” (T, TT 55–56).

By about 1928 the autonomy that Riding claimed for poetry wasabsolute. “Poetry,” she wrote, “is perhaps the only human pursuit left still capable of developing anti-socially” (CS, 32); to write or to readpoetry was to inhabit the nonsocial space she designated “unreality.”Her claim for poetic autonomy was fundamentally an argument withthe world about the nature of authority. It was an insistence on thevalidity of “personal authority,” which was not derivative of or subject to evaluation by systems of knowledge grounded in social consensusbut was intrinsic to the intelligence of the truly individual mind. But personal authority is an oxymoron, and poetic autonomy an impos-sible postulate: authority, like language, is a phenomenon of commu-nities. Riding’s departure from poetry manifested a profound craving for intellectual, perhaps spiritual, community, as does The Telling. Sheggwas never able, however, to cede authority to some imperfect process of consensus formation; her vision simply dissolved the matter by dissolv-ing difference itself.

Riding falls into place with those early-twentieth-century fi gureswho measured modernity by the credence it gave to art and literatureand declared it grievously lacking. All the fi gures we call modernist undertook to refashion art for modernity; within that group there isanother, whose members wanted also to refashion modernity for art.Here we fi nd Lewis with his proposals for the disenfranchisement of the masses, Pound with his fascistic radio broadcasts, Eliot with hisChristian society. Here too is Riding, announcing the demise of time

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and the dawn of human transfi guration, imagining away “the ordeal of Difference called the ‘universe’” (T,TT 26). In the years that she was writ-ing poetry, Riding believed that her labor was bringing human beingscloser to a condition of unity and truth. It was not, but the poems sheproduced, more often than not, are greater than the end for which they were written.

Ella Zohar Ophir is lecturer at the University of Toronto. Forthcoming essaysinclude a study of the fi ctions of Laura Riding and Wyndham Lewis and an inquiryinto modernist treatments of everyday life.