[(The Failure of Poetry, the Promise of Language)] [Author: Laura Riding Jackson] published on

Poets on Poetry

by Laura (Riding) Jackson

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

Unknown Binding

First published May 22, 2007

About the author

Laura (Riding) Jackson was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer.

1923-1926 as Laura Riding Gottschalk
1927-1939 as Laura Riding
1963-1991 as Laura (Riding) Jackson

She also published under the pseudonym Madeleine Vara.

Reviews

[H]

The premise of these essays shook me up. But the theory's so abstruse it hardly moves me. And glancing back at something like Stevens' poems I'm seduced away from Riding's thesis.

From what I gather, the fundamentally inherent contradiction in poetry is that of creed vs craft. The creed seeks unity for the crisis of universal utterance (of communicating truth, connecting truly through words). But poetry is fated to fail because it depends on craft, trapping us in a past formal space, and leading toward obscure or aesthetically seducing truths rather than the real truth. Storytelling, she says but briefly, does not have this inherent contradiction.

Must read Rational Meaning next if it proclaims a solution.