Laura Riding - Renunciation of Poetry; Later Writings

Renunciation of Poetry; Later Writings

In about 1941 Riding renounced poetry, though it would be fifteen to twenty years before she would feel able to begin explaining her reasons and exploring her unfolding findings. She withdrew from public literary life, working with Schuyler Jackson on a dictionary (published posthumously in 1997) that would lead them into an exploration of the foundations of meaning and language. In April 1962 she read "Introduction for a Broadcast" for the BBC Third Programme, her first formal statement of her reasons for renouncing poetry (there had been a brief reference book entry in 1955). An expanded version of the piece was published that year in the New York magazine Chelsea, which also published "Further on Poetry" in 1964, writings on the theme of women-and-men in 1965 and 1974, and in 1967, The Telling.

The 62 numbered passages of The Telling, a "personal evangel", formed the "core part" of a book of the same title, thought by some to be her most important book alongside Collected Poems. Writings and publications continued to flow throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties, as Laura (Riding) Jackson (her authorial name from 1963–64 onwards) explored what she regarded as the truth-potential of language free from the artificial restrictions of poetic art. "My faith in poetry was at heart a faith in language as the elementary wisdom", she had written in 1976 ("The Road To, In, And Away From, Poetry", Reader 251). Her later writings attest to what she regarded as the truth-potential contained in language and in the human mind. She might be regarded as a spiritual teacher whose unusually high valuation of language led her to choose literature as the locus of her work.

Two entire issues of Chelsea were given over to new writings by her, It Has Taken Long (1976) and The Sufficient Difference (2001). Publication of her work has continued since her death in 1991, including First Awakenings (her early poems) (1992), Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words (1997), The Poems of Laura Riding, A Newly Revised Edition of the 1938/1980 Collection (2001), Under The Mind's Watch (2004), The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language (2007), and On the Continuing of the Continuing (2008). The latest book to appear is her two-volume literary memoirs, The Person I Am (2011). Her works have been published in France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Poland, Brazil and Norway.