Come, words, away to miracle
More natural than written art.
You are surely somewhat devils,
But I know a way to soothe
The whirl of you when speech blasphemes
Against the silent half of language
And, labouring the blab of mouths,
You tempt prolixity to ruin.
--from "Come, Words, Away" by Laura (Riding) Jackson
A couple of years after the publication of her Collected Poems, Laura Riding renounced poetry. She is more famous now for this renunciation and the great deal of writing she did to explain the act, than she is for the poetry she wrote during her twenties and thirties, poetry which influenced many of the Modernists. She is even more famous, I have discovered, for being the mistress/muse/instructor of Robert Graves during his most fertile years as novelist, poet, and critic. A succession of journalists and biographers have demonized Riding (known the last fifty years of her life as Laura (Riding) Jackson), calling her a witch, a madwoman, and the like. I've been reading The Failure of Poetry (a posthumous collection of notes, essays, and letters for a book Riding had planned), and I can tell you that Riding seemed like a difficult person. I find this difficulty fascinating, and because the book is so repetitive and frequently incoherent*, I am wondering more about the author than I am about her concerns with poetry and language.
In the final stages of that career I claimed, I think, more than anyone has ever claimed for [poetry]...I believed that it was [...] both path of the ideal in language and place of its realization.
Part of the difficulty, it must be admitted, is that Riding has a very high opinion of herself. One can hardly blame her; nearly everyone who met her was struck by her intelligence, and her criticism of poetry is often so astute it's as if she is the only person on earth who knows how to look at a poem. This awareness of her own intelligence, coupled with an awareness of her gifts as a poet (and a prodigy at that, famous and influential in her early twenties), was also yoked to a fragile and immense ego. She was, she claimed, the end of poetry, the poet who had brought poetry as far as it could go, never to be surpassed. Robert Graves claimed to believe in her actual divinity, at least for a time. Riding saw her influence, in terms of poetic style, all around her for the rest of her life, and she was deeply stung by the lack of acknowledgement from those who "stole" from her, and deeply offended that these poets had gladly taken her formal poetic strategies but ignored entirely the philosophical motivation behind the innovations, rendering their own poetry meaningless, mockeries of her work. She also had axes to grind with Auden and Graves, especially the latter:
Mr. Graves is, of course, a very special case, in the history of my influence. For a period of about thirteen years of personal association, he, a man of limited, and largely derivative, literary skill, and constricted intellectual outlook, but of an audacious ambition, suggesting, by its very audacity, intents and virtues beyond the ordinary, had all he could use of my influence.
Why did Riding give up poetry? Her version goes something like this: before turning away from poetry, she had thought that poetry was
where language could come into its own, and the speakers of words with it [...] Language is as the net of reason thrown over the universal, spread by the force of that all-touching spirit of being which it is human to be all-moved by, so that we are as ones having the net in our hands. then do we but keep the net clean, whole, well-mended, losing nothing caught within it, ordering everything in our mind's safe-keeping, knowing well what we have in each word (for word is the form of that which we catch in the net), we shall fulfill the sense of the net, of the spread over which it is spread, of the spirit that attends the spread and casts the net and gathers in ourselves, and the sense of ourselves. [...] When I found that the promise poetry gave of affording place for an occurrence in which words, World, and ourselves came, through words, under the saving principle of truth was but an invitation to act out--with the happiness of art--the tragedy of the Impossibility of such Good, poetry itself became Impossibility to me.
I am suspicious of this story, because her a priori assumptions about poetry are not necessarily true, and also because the passion with which she addresses poetry and poets seems quite personal and strikes me as the language of one who has suffered some injury, some trauma. I began to poke around in her biography and of course the story of her menage a trois with Graves and his wife Nancy came into view, the dual suicide attempt in London (Riding threw herself out of a fifth-floor window, and Graves--maybe--out of a fourth-floor window moments later; Riding was seriously injured but Graves was not), the skiving off to Majorca and the later parting of ways. Not long after, Riding renounced poetry. I thought for a while that the break with poetry was a reaction to the end of her affair with Graves, but Riding was not the sort to give up being the poet goddess just because one unstable and difficult acolyte was found wanting. Riding thought far too much of herself for that. Her poetry was, after all
a new order, that I instituted, which put a mark of finality between the human existence of history and a human immediacy that stays, and rendered the Past understandable in terms of not just itself.
Then I thought that, despite the seeming lack of autobiography in Riding's poems and other writings, the historical context might at least partly explain why Riding abandoned poetry in 1941. Her parents were poor Jews who emigrated to New York from Germany in the 1880s, and though they were not religious people, having a Jewish heritage might make one sensitive to certain world-historical events in the 1930s. During Riding's final years as a poet, Germany was conducting a mass murder of Jews, and Hitler's Nazi party had already begun their project to deform language itself, to create a language of propaganda that hid the truth behind emotional manipulation. If language itself could not be trusted, if metaphor served to sanitize genocide, then what faith could one have in poetry, the art of words?
I don't think that political events had anything to do with it, though. Riding was openly opposed to poets using their work to pick sides over the events of the day, no matter how important those events might be. Riding's ideas about truth and poetry were beyond time, beyond history. And poetry's problem was poetry itself: poetry trades in metaphor and emotional manipulation, its symbolism triumphing over its meaning. Words were used not just for figurative language, but also to make combinations of sounds, a music of language, that had nothing to do with truth, and this craft of making music, making rhythm, making rhyme and all the rest of it, left poetry dead, left poetry a beautified and entrancing and seductive corpse that could be made to sing beguiling songs that had no real meaning or value. This was the failing, that the art, the poetic values of poetry, do not enhance language; they form a barrier to speaking truth, and this barrier, no matter how thin one made it, was fatal.
Poetry was dead, so Riding needed to move on, to the realm of pure (what she called "rational") language. In the 1930s, Riding had already embarked on a project called The Dictionary of Exact Meanings, "a collection of 24,000 crucial words of the English language defined in such a way as to erase any ambiguity..." That unambiguous dictionary is clearly a hopeless project, as language is a reflection of the mind, not of the universe, and our minds are nothing if not ambiguous and opaque. There is an inadequacy between the sign and its object, as Charles Sanders Pierce would say, but Riding denied that modern conception of language. Riding was battling historical forces and evolution, so was bound to lose the fight. She went down swinging, though.
None who have drawn upon my poems for advantage to their own have comprehended and acted upon, in so doing, the broadening and strengthening of the intellectual function of poetry that was the basis of, and governing reason of, my enlargement of its linguistic compass.
Riding believed that words have intrinsic (and, I think, fixed) meaning, that they are-and-contain their meaning, that meaning is not relative or imposed upon them by the psychology or social situatedness of the speaker, and that to believe the latter is to betray language somehow, to enter the realm of lies. It's a Wittgensteinian view, that reality flows from language, that to speak truth is to create the world, and that to speak less than truth is to say nothing. It also obviously hearkens back to Old Testament imagery, of God speaking the heavens and earth into existence. Riding herself, I think, worshiped language, or if not language, then some hidden god behind language. She said in 1980 that during her years a a poet, she'd been "religious in her devotion to poetry." She'd claimed for poetry--which she saw as an evolutionary development out of pre-literate religious chanting--the only path to truth, and claimed an exalted status for poets, as priestly truth-tellers among humanity. She was a true believer, a fanatic, and fanatics are always either saints, or madmen, or both. Her writing about poetry after her abandonment of it has the aura of the disciple who has lost her religion:
Poetry has been the vessel, in human society, of the objective of spiritual articulateness; and the vessel was not adequate to the pursuit of the objective. [...] Why, if it was so inadequate, was it not abandoned and replaced by something better? Human beings face crises of utterance they cannot avoid without denial of their nature: they have a final sort of speaking to do, and poetry conventionalizes the necessity, frames in the crises in a manner that seems to put the solution of them within safe reach.
Between the poet as language-priest and the reading congregation there is an unwitting unholy covenant to evade the intellectual, and therefore linguistic, final difficulties, and yet by exploiting a certain "way with words"--the poet leading, the congregation following--to transcend them, dissolve them, soar past them. There is a diabolical side to poetry, which adds overtones of angelic beauty to the din of ordinary parlance. This is its futility, its ministering to the vanities rather than to the needs of human beings in their dependence on words, its raising them to heights of illusion of linguistic felicity only to let them drop down to real speaking ground with no increase of capacity to make--or rather, let--words carry full burden of meaning. Ultimately, in the human production and enjoyment of poetry, poetry proves good only for itself. It provides something to admire--to do which may be argued to be useful and also argued to be an empty justification for its existence.
As the apostate is, finally, how I've come to view Riding. She was the high priestess of a universal religion that has been forgotten, and poetry was a false idol she put by to become the high priestess of language-itself, of words-themselves, and she is the oracle of the god, and the scourge of heaven, and she is blinded by her own divinity and wisdom and enraged that we are not similarly blinded. Or, as I put it more than once to Mighty Reader, Laura (Riding) Jackson is brilliant but a bit of a crank, but I can see why people in close proximity were drawn to her, as the force of her personality is quite powerful, even just in these notes. In the flesh, she must've been quite something. A lot of her claims about poetry-as-poetry, ignoring all the "poetry is a dead end" stuff, is compelling and informative and useful if you want to be a better reader/writer of poems. When she's not blinkered by personal animus (and even sometimes when she is), she can reveal what there is in a poem in ways I've never seen anyone else do. A remarkable critical facility, quite impressive and one that cannot be dismissed. But as a personality, a bit of a narcissistic crank. She confused all of poetry with her own poet-activity, but there is no failing in poetry; it is merely that (as Paul Auster notes) "poetry as she conceived of it was no longer capable of saying what she wanted to say," so she abandoned it. She spent the rest of her life simultaneously decrying poetry and drawing attention to the triumphs she'd had there.
Despite all the wrong-headedness Riding displays about language and the art of poetry, despite her insistence that we all stop and look at her in admiration and gratitude, there is a strange and appealing optimism at the heart of her battle. Riding believes that truth, and therefore goodness, inheres within us as the root of our humanity, and that if we could only find a way of speaking that truth, we would become good. We would, maybe, restore to the world the primal good that God saw in His original speaking, would ourselves speak our way back into Paradise. Maybe Riding hoped for that paradise until the day she died. That hope is not nothing.
*It is ironic that Riding's quest for an unambiguous speech resulted in prose that is often nearly impossible to read. I am not the only person who has noticed this irony, but I might be the only reader who is amused by it, because I have great empathy for the artist whose faith in their art is tested by ideas of truth, so much that speech becomes inarticulate because one knows not which way to turn the phrase in order to avoid falsehood.
Also: I am not a (Riding) Jackson scholar, and there are a variety of conflicting versions of her life (and of Grave's life), and I may have some of my dates wrong here. Mostly my concern is with her as a complex character, with the tension between how she was clearly right and wrong about the same subject, taking extreme positions, living within her odd personal egotism. This could be one of my "how to write a novel" posts, because a lot of this sort of thinking goes into my process of working out a book. You were not wondering, but now you know anyway.
