Part 1: Laura (Riding) Jackson(1901-1991) was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer whom I came to know about in the first years of my retirement after a 50 year student-and-paid-employment life: 1949 to 1999. In 1938 W.H. Auden called her "the only living philosophical poet, and in 1939 another American poet, Robert Fitzgerald, expressed the hope that with the 1938 publication of her Collected Poems, "the authority and the dignity of truth-telling, lost by poetry to science, may gradually be regained."1 For the last two days I have spent many hours reading about this most philosophical of poets who has come onto the radar of many writers and poets since the early 1990s, partly due to the extensive publication of her work which has continued since her death in 1991. I began reading and writing poetry seriously, myself, in the early 1990s. I first heard of Laura Riding back in the 1990s, but time and circumstance, responsibilities and health issues, prevented me from taking a serious look at her life and work. Part 1.1: Jack Blackmore, in a paper given at The Laura (Riding) Jackson Conference in 2010 expressed the view that: "There are affinities between Riding, Coleridge, and William Blake. There is a common optimism and conviction: that one’s self, one self, through the most intense scrutiny of and engagement with language and life, can take the measure of the universe."2 Blackmore included the following quotation from Coleridge to support that poet's affinity with Riding: "The Poet is not only the man who is made to solve the riddle of the Universe, but he is also the man who feels where it is not solved and this continually awakens his feelings …"-Coleridge, Lecture on Poetry, 12 December 1811. Blackmore went on to say that "more than any poet in recent times Laura Riding conceived of her poems as a whole work, a universe."2 And so, too, do I in relation to what has become a vast corpus, a very large personal oeuvre. There are many aspects of Riding's philosophy of poetry, her view of writing, literature and life that provide parallels with my own way of going about my literary enterprise. It is for this reason that I write this prose-poetic piece.

1. AN ELOQUENT BREVITY
Part 1:
Laura (Riding) Jackson(1901-1991) was an American poet, critic,
novelist, essayist and short story writer whom I came to know about
in the first years of my retirement after a 50 year student-and-paid-
employment life: 1949 to 1999. In 1938 W.H. Auden called her "the
only living philosophical poet, and in 1939 another American poet,
Robert Fitzgerald, expressed the hope that with the 1938 publication
of her Collected Poems, "the authority and the dignity of truth-
telling, lost by poetry to science, may gradually be regained."1
For the last two days I have spent many hours reading about this most
philosophical of poets who has come onto the radar of many writers
and poets since the early 1990s, partly due to the extensive
publication of her work which has continued since her death in 1991.
I began reading and writing poetry seriously, myself, in the early
1990s. I first heard of Laura Riding back in the 1990s, but time and
circumstance, responsibilities and health issues, prevented me from
taking a serious look at her life and work.
Part 1.1:
Jack Blackmore, in a paper given at The Laura (Riding) Jackson
Conference in 2010 expressed the view that: "There are affinities
between Riding, Coleridge, and William Blake. There is a common
optimism and conviction: that one’s self, one self, through the most
intense scrutiny of and engagement with language and life, can take
the measure of the universe."2 Blackmore included the following
quotation from Coleridge to support that poet's affinity with Riding:
"The Poet is not only the man who is made to solve the riddle of the
Universe, but he is also the man who feels where it is not solved and
this continually awakens his feelings …"-Coleridge, Lecture on
Poetry, 12 December 1811.
Blackmore went on to say that "more than any poet in recent times
Laura Riding conceived of her poems as a whole work, a universe."2
And so, too, do I in relation to what has become a vast corpus, a very

2. large personal oeuvre. There are many aspects of Riding's philosophy
of poetry, her view of writing, literature and life that provide parallels
with my own way of going about my literary enterprise. It is for this
reason that I write this prose-poetic piece.
Part 2:
Even in her earliest days as a poet in the 1920s, she felt that literature
offered opportunity for the interpretation of individual experience as a
contribution to the realisation of the highest aspirations of human
existence.2 Her lifelong quest was for a way of right living, based on
right speaking. Though serious in her dedication to finding solutions
to the problems of human existence, she refused to be aligned with
any 'isms,' insisting that human beings should abjure what is divisive
and temporal and concentrate their efforts toward communicating to
one another the innate spiritual knowledge that is their human legacy.1
To put this another way, "for this poet nothing but heart-felt meaning
finally matters.’3 I came to an appreciation of literature in a much
different way than Riding. The social sciences took my attention until
my 30s; literature, both prose and poetry, made intellectual inroads
into my life-narrative by degrees in my 30s and 40s. By my 50s my
academic and literary agenda was packed-to-the-rafters in a
multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, headset and mindscape, panorama
and prospect.
In the 1920s Riding wrote about what she called "a new race of
poets...rough-edged and stalwart beings, pioneers equipped for both
static ecstasy and the ability to progress into unexplored territory,
possessing an extreme idealism, the belief in organic growth and an
inner core of necessary meaning."4 She saw the poetic enterprise, at
least for most of the years in the 1920s and 1930s, as a collaborative
and pleasurable activity requiring fellow poets to adjust their interests
to central themes and a unity of values, to sacrifice their individuality
to a pervasive and unifying totality of poetic meaning.
These words had particular resonance for me since it was in the 1920s
and 1930s that the first pioneers arose in response to Abdul-Baha's
teaching Plan as outlined in His Tablets of the Divine Plan written

3. during the Great War. This was a Plan I have come to be associated
with for more than 60 years of my life. The entre deux guerres
generation, sometimes known as the silent generation from the mid-
20s to the early 1940s, was the first generation of pioneers to take part
in that Plan. In the 1960s I became part of what was the third
generation of pioneers. These words of Riding's were more than a
little apt as a descriptor of "the new race of men" called forth in the
Baha'i community to put that Plan into action. In the 1990s, after the
death of Riding, I became one of that "new race of poets." Or so I
liked to think. I thank Riding for helping me gain a helpful, a quite
personally meaningful perspective on literature in general, poetry in
particular, and especially the literary history of the last century.
Part 2.1:
Riding felt that poets were, by constitution and inclination,
fragmented in a multitude of contrasting selves who present at any
one time only a temporary approximation of meaning, and only a
temporary but often, if not always, an unstable coordination of
selves.5 The older I have got, and particularly as I got into my 60s and
70s, the more I became aware of the nature of the constitution that has
carried me through life and the inclinations that have determined so
much of what has happened to me; these contrasting, these fractured,
and only partly coordinated selves have certainly been characterized
by the temporary in relation to all sorts of activities and an evolving
meaning structure in my life.
From the late 1920s to 1940 Riding worked closely in a fertile but
volatile relationship with the prolific English poet, novelist, critic, and
classicist Robert Graves(1895-1985). He had his own views of
writing prose and poetry. He saw the writing of poetry, among other
things, as "a complex experience in which the poet must always drag
about the dead load of sense with him."5 These two poets collaborated
in varying degrees of intensity and success for two decades.
Part 3:
There was what Riding called in her Collected Poems of 1938: “an
uncovering of truth in writing poetry, a truth of so fundamental and

4. general a kind that no other name besides poetry is adequate except
truth?”5 In that same 1938 preface to her Collected Poems she wrote,
“One reads to uncover to oneself something that would otherwise
remain unknown—something that one feels it is important to know”5
"The goal of poetry to Riding," wrote Andrea Rexilius in her analysis
of Riding's work, "is to reach the edge of our capacity to know
ourselves, to lean as far outside of the body as is possible without
collapsing in on the self. Poetry is a telescope, or a microscope, that
focuses awareness of the body, and through the body focuses an
awareness on self, not an individual self, but the 'self-ness of being',
perhaps even a selflessness, a nothingness."6
Part 3:
There had developed in the 20th century, Riding observed, a
distinction between audiences which on the one hand wanted their
poetry real and grounded in the vernacular, so to speak, and on the
other audiences which wanted poetry to be a transcendent practice of
truth-telling, but in a different, a more elevated and unreal musical
register. Riding came to the view before WW2 that both poetic
registers or styles were examples of truth-telling. Keeping poetry
colloquially real and grounded in the vernacular was one type of
truth-telling. This type involved ordinary men and women writing
ordinary messages to the world. Words defined the essence of poetry,
and its subject matter was just ordinary life; the emphasis was on
meaning rather than a poetic artifice of language.
Part 3.1:
When just 61, in April 1962, Laura did a reading for the BBC. The
reading involved her first formal and public statement of her reasons
for renouncing poetry. She rejected, or renounced, poetry for many
reasons; she came to see most of it as artifice, and artifice
compromised truth-telling which she had previously seen as the major
function of poetry. I was but 18, when Riding made this statement on
the BBC. I was in the last months of my high school life, the last
months of my adolescent baseball, hockey and football careers, and
the first months of my romantic-erotic life. This was just before I left

5. my home town and before I began my travelling-pioneering days for
and in the Canadian Baha'i community; it was also just before the first
signs of bipolar I disorder were apparent in my psycho-social life.
The roller-coaster of my emotional life gradually settled-down by
degrees and, by my 50s and 60s, it had settled-down sufficiently for
me to engage in a literary-writing life. As I look back from the
perspective of my 70s, I see the improved treatments for my mental-
health issues, as an important factor in helping me develop my poetic,
my literary, sensibility.
Part 4:
Riding came to see truth-telling as essentially a biographical process
involving the finding and refining of her “real voice.” This real voice
was found in her Brooklyn background; she came to feel by degrees
throughout the 1940s and 1950s that, when she had previously written
poetry, she had been putting-on an exaggerated voice; this voice was
a substitution for what she came to see as her real voice, a voice
expressed in her bio-social, bio-psychological, life and in her Polish-
Jewish Brooklynese.
Riding continued throughout her life to explore what she regarded as
the truth-potential of language, free from any of the artificial
restrictions of poetic art. "My faith in poetry was at heart, and in the
long run, a faith in language as the elementary wisdom", she wrote in
1976.5 I was just starting my three year stint at the University of
Ballarat as a lecturer in the social sciences, and in the Ballarat Baha'i
community as its chairman and secretary. My only son was also born
during this time. I was, then, in my early 30s, and still battling with
episodes of BPD. I knew nothing of Riding in the 1970s. I had not
really begun to seriously engage in either studying poetry or writing
it.
Part 4.1:
Riding came to feel that poetry disappoints its readers because “all is
suffused with the light of drab poetic secularity.” She also questioned
poetry as a craft because it was nearly always rooted in
individualism’s “claim to self-sufficiency." "Is that all there is?", she

6. asks. "Poets are just like Santa’s helpers tinkering with their toy-
poems and constantly talking about 'process' as the 'natural and
legitimate' concern of the poet.” Her final apprehension of the flawed
nature of poetic utterance came as the result of an arduous intellectual
journey that spanned at least two decades,1 the two decades that were
my life, from the time my parents met in about 1940, until the early
'60s when I began my travelling-and-pioneering for the Canadian
Baha'i community.
In the 1960s and 1970s Riding's poetry became too abstract, too
intellectual, too based in ideas for many poets and critics. “If your
central motive as a writer is to put across ideas,” the American short
story writer and essayist Steve Almond(1966-) stated, “write an
essay.” The novelist and critic Stephen Koch warned that poets should
not be too intellectual. The result of these views among the many
views of others, Riding thought, was that knowledge had been pretty
much removed from poetry. Poetry was sidelined into creative
writing departments at universities. Sticking poetry into creative
writing departments was part of Riding’s critique of much of modern
poetry. Poets who focus heavily on craft-making, and who court
verbal sensuosity at the expense of truth-telling, these are the poets in
the creative writing departments.3
Part 5:
In 1995, four years after her passing, and fours year before my early
retirement, my sea-change, after a student-and-paid-employment-life
of 50 years: 1949 to 1999, the following words of Riding's were
found in the London Review of Books:7
"Another way of describing my point of view is to say that I am trying
to function in the field of human criticism rather than in that of
literary criticism......During my career as a poet I became increasingly
an advocate of poetry." In the final stages of her poetic career which
had ended by the 1940s, she claimed and she believed that "poetry
was the way of truth, and to truth, the ‘of’ and the ‘to’ being mingled
in my mind in a fond hope that somewhere along the way approach
would turn into arrival."

7. "Lest my use of ‘truth’ in the preceding sentence throws a religious
mist over my meaning, let me recast my phrasing: I believed that
poetry was the way of speaking true and the way to speaking true,
both a path of the ideal in language and a place of its realisation. This
double focus was the result of my not having a categorically literary
conception of poetry."
Riding came eventually to believe, certainly by the 1960s if not well
before, that "there was something ineradicably wrong with the activity
of poetry, and that this was reflected in poetry, the matter, as I call it. I
arrived at this belief not from disapproval of the cultivation of
extraordinary linguistic powers to which poets are professionally
dedicated, not with any priggish bias towards the plain-ordinary
verbal level, but in the persuasion that poetry involves a distortion of
a natural human ambition of linguistic self-fulfilment, and that poets
delude themselves into feeling that they attain a verbal serene above
the murk of commonplace articulateness, and that they obstruct the
general vision of human linguistic potentialities with the appearance
of doing so."8
Part 5.1:
"As a poet," wrote Riding, "I am a participant in a worldly epic in
which significance can be found in living and dying, together with
everything and everyone else. My higher self deals with this epic.
Everyday language and discourse was just so much social rhythmic
clutter." "Poetry," she wrote in 1962, "is not the natural spiritual
speech of human beings....she called this kind of speech in poetry
"linguistically freakish."
"In the ordinary way of speaking, and the ordinary way of writing,
called ‘prose’, which is modelled on this ordinariness, there is an
obvious murkiness; the ‘good’ speaker or prose-writer is one who is
able to keep this murkiness minimal. In the poetic way of writing,
which is at once a non-ordinary way of speaking, there is no escape
from murkiness, but such murkiness is concealable; the ‘good’ poet is
one who keeps this murkiness so inconspicuous that it makes no overt
problem for his or her or anybody else’s intelligence."

8. Part 6:
Riding wrote that her concern above all was to “the conduct of life
itself.” The poet is called upon to remind people what the universe
really looks and feels like. This is the function of the language of the
poet; this is what language means: the poet must use language in a
fresh way or even invent new language. As the poet reads or writes,
the audience-readers, ideally, become the poet, and the poet the
audience. They are all suddenly one. Here the reader touches the poet
and vice versa.9
"Much of the magical effect that poetry gives of rendering everything
it touches pellucid comes from the necessity of compression that it
imposes. The impossibility of pausing in poetry, except in order to
make sense and clarity, causes many a set of words actually deficient
in linguistic workmanship to pass for an eloquent brevity.-Ron Price
with thanks to:1Elizabeth Friedmann in the preface of A Mannered
Grace: The Life of Laura (Riding) Jackson, Persea Books, Inc.,
2005; 2Jack Blackmore in a paper given at The Laura
(Riding) Jackson Conference in 2010; 3 Introduction to A Selection of
the Poems of Laura Riding, 1994, p3; 4Carla Billitteri, "Riding-
Graves: The Meaning of Collaboration", internet site; 5Laura Riding,
Collected Works, 1938, Preface; 6
Andrea Rexilius, "Laura (Riding)
Jackson: Against the Commodity of the Poem (part 1), essays,
features', Nottingham Trent University, 22/2/'14; 7Laura Riding, "The
Road To, In, And Away From, Poetry", Reader, p. 251; 8Laura Riding
"The Promise of Words" in the London Review of Books(Vol. 17, No.
17, 7 September 1995), and 9Benjamin Hollander, "Looking for (Mrs)
Laura (Riding) Jackson, the anti-social people’s poet, from Jamaica (Queens)
to Woodruff Avenue (Brooklyn)" in The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives
on Arts, Politics and Culture, 14/7/'15.
Part 6.1::
Making everything I touch
pellucid, clear, bright, plain,
simple, luminous, explicit;

9. comprehensible, transparent,
pure, limpid, translucent, and
distinct, perspicuous.........one
can but try as one engages in
in the act of compression, and
a so very eloquent brevity!!!!1
1 In A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 1927, p.84, co-authored by Robert
Graves, she/they write: "The quarrel now is between the reading
public and the modernist poet over the definition of clearness. Both
agree that perfect clearness is the end of poetry, but the reading public
insists that no poetry is clear except what it can understand at a
glance; the modernist poet insists that the clearness of which the
poetic mind is capable demands thought and language of a far greater
sensitiveness and complexity than the enlarged reading public will
permit it to use. To remain true to his conception of what poetry is, he
has therefore to run the risk of seeming obscure or freakish, of having
no reading public; even of writing what the reading public refuses to
call poetry, in order to be a poet.
I have become aware of this problem, the problem of the reading
public, in the last three decades, 1985 to 2015, when most of my
poetry has been written. One of my responses has been to remove as
much of the obscurity from my work as possible, but still maintaining
a certain academic, serious, somewhat elite-and-exclusive, elevated
style and content.
Ron Price
2/2/'15 to 6 /2/'15.