Laura Riding

When Laura Riding sailed for England in December, 1925, she left many of her personal belongings in the safekeeping of a friend in Greenwich Village. Among these items was a box containing the typescripts of more than two hundred poems, a few of which had been published in magazines such as The Fugitive, Poetry Nomad, Lyric West, and Contemporary Verse. Then aged twenty-four, Laura Riding had already been hailed as a leading voice of her generation. She had come to New York to pursue a life devoted to poetry, but saw her American contemporaries as lacking a seriousness, both poetic and personal, which she considered to be the poet's essential attribute. So when an invitation came from Robert Graves and Nancy Nicholson in England, she accepted. In Europe she found "solitariness in which to probe the reality of poetry as a spiritual, not merely literary, inheritance." Although by 1938 she could say that "to live in, by, for the reasons of, poems is to habituate oneself to the good existence," her probing finally led her to renounce poetry; she had found poetic utterance inherently incapable of yielding the full truth-potential of words. Meanwhile the correspondence with the friend in New York had continued. In 1979 her friend wrote that she had discovered, in storage, the cache of poems left behind. Arrangements were made for its return, and during the months before her death in 1991, Laura (Riding) Jackson was preparing these early poems for publication. Rediscovering these poems of her youth, Laura (Riding) Jackson saw in them "a precise anticipation of an envisaged whole of poetry." Readers will find here the same confident authorial presence that permeates the "self-determining canon" of her poetic work, which she identified as her Collected Poems of 1938 (reprinted in 1980 by Persea as The Poems of Laura Riding), many of the themes developed in her later work, and a characteristic freshness of vision and scrupulosity of word-use. These poems are experiments in what poetry can do. They are early stepping stones on the path that led Laura (Riding) Jackson ultimately to a realization of what poetry cannot do. Those familiar with the poetry of Laura Riding will read First Awakenings with the delight of enlarged recognition, and those approaching it as an introduction to her work will find direction for the mind's journey.

Once a culturally rich world, the planet Aka has been utterly transformed by technology. Records of the past have been destroyed, and citizens are strictly monitored. But an official observer from Earth will discover a group of outcasts who still practice its lost religion-the Telling. Intrigued by their beliefs, she joins them on a sacred pilgrimage into the mountains...and into the dangerous terrain of her own heart, mind, and soul.

This new edition of Contemporaries and Snobs, a landmark collection of essays by Laura Riding, offers a counter-history of high modernist poetics.

"Anarchism Is Not Enough is a manifesto against systematic thinking, a difficult book by a famously difficult writer. For the scope of its critical imagination, it is the most radical work of Laura Riding's early period. Published in 1928, when Riding was twenty-seven, Anarchism is a kind of early autobiographia literaria. Long out of print and now available for the first time in paperback, this is one of the most imaginative and daring works of literary theory ever written by a modernist figure."--Jacket.

"Laura (Riding) Jackson, the important American poet and thinker, emerged as a powerful literary voice in the 1920s with the publication of her earliest poems, stories, and criticism. In 1941, at the height of her fame as a poet, Laura (Riding) Jackson turned her attention exclusively to prose writings about language, sexuality, morality, and other subjects of general human concern." "Finally, here in one portable volume are the key texts from the full range of this eminent author's work. Included from the early writings are a generous selection of the poems, chapters from such major works as A Survey of Modernist Poetry (with Robert Graves), Anarchism Is Not Enough, and The Word "Woman" and Other Related Writings, along with four complete stories from Progress of Stories and the striking preface to her 1938 Collected Poems. The editor has also compiled an ample and representative selection of Laura (Riding) Jackson's later writings."--Jacket.

"The books paired here make up the first collaborative study of 'Modernist' poetry by two of the twentieth century's most important and original poets. In A Survey of Modernist Poetry, Laura Riding and Robert Graves produce a contemporary reaction to the early experimentation of writers such as Eliot, Pound and e.e. cummings. Their close critical readings are deployed, along the way, in an engagement with Shakespeare scholarship, issues of populism and elitism and an attempt to define - perhaps to invent - that elusive creature known as 'the common reader'." "The Survey contains readings of modern poems and movements and is an illuminating and polemical account of the beginnings of modernism. It is an important resource but also a valuable critical text in the reception and development of modernist poetry in English. A Pamphlet Against Anthologies is an entertaining polemic against the perceived iniquities of the trade anthology. A statement of poetic integrity, it poses awkward questions about the production and consumption of art in the mass markets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."--Jacket.

"Existing only in manuscript since the 1940s but enjoying an underground reputation among friends and advocates, this primary document by one of the most original and influential of American poets and thinkers is now being published as Rational Meaning, Laura (Riding) Jackson's testament of the necessity of living for truth. Begun as a dictionary and thesaurus in the 1930s, the work developed into a fundamental reevaluation of language itself. Riding, in close collaboration with her husband, continued this monumental project over the succeeding decades, completing it after his death in 1968." "At the core of Rational Meaning, which aims to restore the truth of language by arguing that meaning inheres in words, stands the idea that a total renovation of the knowledge of language is needed, not to develop mere verbal sophistication and respectability but fundamentally to reinvigorate the intellectual processes of consciousness. The book reveals the disastrous extent to which language has been "unlearned" and shows how it may be learned again. Rational Meaning will be essential reading, not only for students of literature but for radical-minded linguists and lexicographers unhappy with the orthodoxies current in their disciplines."--BOOK JACKET.