(1901 - 1991)
Laura (Riding) Jackson was born Laura Reichenthal in New York City on January 16, 1901. Her mother's invalidism and her father's inability to find steady work cast a pall over Riding's childhood; as she grew, she eventually came to resent her father's Marxist politics and blamed him for much of the family's misfortune. Subsequently, she renounced politics in favor of poetry. In 1914, the Reichenthals moved from a tenement on Manhattan's East Side to an apartment in the Bedford- Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. In 1918, Riding was admitted to Cornell University on a scholarship, and in 1920 she married Louis Gottschalk, a history instructor at Cornell, and moved with him as he found teaching positions in Urbana, Illinois, and then Louisville, Kentucky. In a bold and decidedly feminist gesture, she asked her new husband to take her name, and he became Louis Reichenthal Gottschalk. In 1923, she changed her own name to Laura Riding Gottschalk. They finally divorced in 1925.
In 1926, Riding's book The Close Chaplet was published, its name derived from a poem by Robert Graves. That same year, she accepted an invitation from Graves to join him and his wife, Nancy, and their two children in England. This began Riding's famous fourteen year association with Graves. Together they founded Seizin Press and cowrote A Survey of Modernist Poetry. In 1927, she formally changed her name to Laura Riding. Although her time in England was for the most part non-turbulent, she threw herself from a window and fractured her spine in 1929. It appears that Riding's suicide attempt was in part an attempt to escape from her complex emotional entanglement in the Grave's household. After a full recovery, she relocated later that year to Mallorca with Graves, who had separated his wife.
Riding published many collections of poems Love as Love, Death as Death; Poems: A Joking Word; Twenty Poem Less; and Collected Poems (1938). In 1939, the year her relationship with Graves ended, she denounced poetry, which she saw as a hindrance to words' ability to convey truth. In June 1941, Riding married writer Schuyler B. Jackson in Elton, Maryland. Jackson left his wife and children in Pennsylvania. They worked together, until his death, on a substantial book called Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words, published at long last in 1997. it was intended to clarify the relation between human goodness and diction. She died in Wabash, Florida, on September 2, 1991.
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| Laura wearing the traditional costume of Mallorca |
In 1926, Riding's book The Close Chaplet was published, its name derived from a poem by Robert Graves. That same year, she accepted an invitation from Graves to join him and his wife, Nancy, and their two children in England. This began Riding's famous fourteen year association with Graves. Together they founded Seizin Press and cowrote A Survey of Modernist Poetry. In 1927, she formally changed her name to Laura Riding. Although her time in England was for the most part non-turbulent, she threw herself from a window and fractured her spine in 1929. It appears that Riding's suicide attempt was in part an attempt to escape from her complex emotional entanglement in the Grave's household. After a full recovery, she relocated later that year to Mallorca with Graves, who had separated his wife.
Riding published many collections of poems Love as Love, Death as Death; Poems: A Joking Word; Twenty Poem Less; and Collected Poems (1938). In 1939, the year her relationship with Graves ended, she denounced poetry, which she saw as a hindrance to words' ability to convey truth. In June 1941, Riding married writer Schuyler B. Jackson in Elton, Maryland. Jackson left his wife and children in Pennsylvania. They worked together, until his death, on a substantial book called Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words, published at long last in 1997. it was intended to clarify the relation between human goodness and diction. She died in Wabash, Florida, on September 2, 1991. DEATH AS DEATH
To conceive death as death
Is difficulty come by easily,
A blankness fallen among
Images of understanding,
Death like a quick cold hand
On the hot slow head of suicide.
So is it come by easily
For one instant. Then again furnaces
Roar in the ears, then again hell revolves,
And the elastic eye holds paradise
At visible length from blindness,
And dazedly the body echoes
"Like this, like this, like nothing else."
Like nothing��a similarity
Without resemblance. The prophetic eye,
Closing upon difficulty,
Opens upon comparison,
Halving the actuality
As a gift too plain, for which
Gratitude has no language,
Foresight no vision.
O VOCABLES OF LOVE
O vocables of love,
O zones of dreamt responses
Where wing on wing folds in
The negro centuries of sleep
And the thick lips compress
Compendiums of silence��
Throats claw the mirror of blind triumph,
Eyes pursue sight into the heart of terror.
Call within call
Succumbs to the indistinguishable
Wall within wall
Embracing the last crushed vocable,
The spoken unity of efforts.
O vocables of love,
The end of an end is an echo,
A last cry follows a last cry.
Finality of finality
Is perfection's touch of folly.
Ruin unfolds from ruin.
A remnant breeds a universe of fragment.
Horizons spread intelligibility
And once more it is yesterday.
REFERENCES:
Baker, Deborah, 1993: In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding. New York: Grove Press.
Friedmann, Elizabeth 2005: A Mannered Grace: The Life of Laura (Riding) Jackson. New York: Persea Books.
Graves, Richard Perceval, 1990: Robert Graves: The Years with Laura. London: Viking.
Jackson, Laura (Riding) 2001: The Poems of Laura Riding: A Newly Revised Edition of the 1938-1980 Collection. London: New York: Persea Books.
Jackson, Laura (Riding) 2007: The Failure of Poetry: The Promise of Language. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Jackson, Laura & Schuyler B. Jackson, 1997: Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
WEBLIOGRAPHY:
In Spanish:
Campbell, Roy 2010: Poemas escogidos. Almer�a: Universidad de Almer�a, p. 315.
In Portuguese:
