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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. This period extends from the end of 1925,
when she left America for Europe and Robert Graves, to 1939, the
year she returned to America, renounced any further writing of
poetry, and soon after married Schuyler Jackson. 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. Lisa Samuels's edition sets the work in its historical
context and elucidates its central intellectual difficulties. Her
introduction and notes are a valuable aid to an understanding of
Riding's work.
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 Meaning: 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.
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 Meaning: 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.
This new edition of "Contemporaries and Snobs," a landmark
collection of essays by Laura Riding, offers a counter-history of
high modernist poetics.
Laura Riding's "Contemporaries and Snobs" (1928) was the first
volume of essays to engage critically with high modernist poetics
from the position of the outsider. For readers today, it offers a
compelling account--by turns personal, by turns historical--of how
the institutionalization of modernism denuded experimental poetry.
Most importantly, "Contemporaries and Snobs" offers a
counter-history of the idiosyncratic, of what the institution of
modernism left (and leaves) behind. With Gertrude Stein as its
figurehead, the book champions the noncanonical, the "barbaric,"
and the undertheorized.
Riding's nuanced defense of a poetics of the person in
"Contemporaries and Snobs" represents a forgotten but essential
first attempt to identify and foster what is now a well-defined
poetic lineage that leads from Stein to the contemporary
experimental avant-garde. In these essays, Riding takes her readers
on a remarkably thorough tour through the critical scene of the
1920s. Among other influential treatises, she considers T. S.
Eliot's "The Sacred Wood" and his editorial essays in "The
Criterion," Allen Tate's "Poetry and the Absolute," John Crowe
Ransom's essays on the modernist poet, Edgell Rickword's essays in
"The Calendar of Modern Letters," and Herbert Read's posthumous
publication of T. E. Hulme's essays. All of this criticism, Riding
notes, gave modern poets a sheen of seriousness and
professionalism, but was it good for poetry? Her decisive answer is
"no." This new edition includes an introduction by Laura Heffernan
and Jane Malcolm that makes legible the many connections between
"Contemporaries and Snobs" and the critical debates and poetic
experiments of the 1920s, as well as explanatory notes, a
chronological bibliography of Riding's work, and an index of proper
names.
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