The Author: Laura (Riding) Jackson worked first as a poet in her native USA, where she was associated with the Fugitives, then in Europe, collaborating as poet and critic with Robert Graves among others. Not long after her return to America in 1939, she renounced poetry, judging it an artificial substitute for natural truth-speaking. There followed two decades devoted to the study of language with her husband Schuyler B. Jackson, crowned by three prolific decades of renewed writing and publishing activity. Laura (Riding) Jackson died in 1991.The Editors: John Nolan is editor of Laura (Riding) Jackson’s The Failure Of Poetry; The Promise Of Language. Alan J. Clark is her authorized bibliographer, and his check-list of her work appeared in Chelsea 69 (2000); he has co-edited her books First Awakenings and The Word «Woman», and was text-editor of The Poems of Laura Riding (2001). The editors are members of the author’s board of literary executors; their several respective contributions on her work have appeared in the UK, USA, Japan, and Brazil.

«…ce recueil de textes devra figurer dans la bibliothèque de celles et de ceux qui s’interrogent à propos du sens de la modernité poétique anglo-saxonne.» (Alain Suberchicot, Transatlantica)

• Contents: The essays on language focus on: The importance of knowledge of words – The harmful effects of science-inspired approaches to language, eg structuralism – The relations between language, reason, thought, mind, spirit – The essays on literature focus on: The immorality of competitive literary individualism – Twentieth-century poetry – Her own poetry and its sequel in her testament The Telling (1972) – The question of her influence; poetry contrasted with philosophy and religion – The novel – Her judgements of writers such as Coleridge and contemporaries such as Stein – The essays on life focus on: Human identity as centred to ‘soul’ – Women’s active unselfishness – Polity and spirituality – Liberalism’s moral indeterminacy – The ascendancy of professionalized specialisms, eg mathematical intellectualism, and its implications for general thinking – Imagination – Myth – Friendship, love, death, good and evil.

The Author: Laura (Riding) Jackson worked first as a poet in her native USA, where she was associated with the Fugitives, then in Europe, collaborating as poet and critic with Robert Graves among others. Not long after her return to America in 1939, she renounced poetry, judging it an artificial substitute for natural truth-speaking. There followed two decades devoted to the study of language with her husband Schuyler B. Jackson, crowned by three prolific decades of renewed writing and publishing activity. Laura (Riding) Jackson died in 1991.The Editors: John Nolan is editor of Laura (Riding) Jackson’s The Failure Of Poetry; The Promise Of Language. Alan J. Clark is her authorized bibliographer, and his check-list of her work appeared in Chelsea 69 (2000); he has co-edited her books First Awakenings and The Word «Woman», and was text-editor of The Poems of Laura Riding (2001). The editors are members of the author’s board of literary executors; their several respective contributions on her work have appeared in the UK, USA, Japan, and Brazil.

«…ce recueil de textes devra figurer dans la bibliothèque de celles et de ceux qui s’interrogent à propos du sens de la modernité poétique anglo-saxonne.» (Alain Suberchicot, Transatlantica)

• Contents: The essays on language focus on: The importance of knowledge of words – The harmful effects of science-inspired approaches to language, eg structuralism – The relations between language, reason, thought, mind, spirit – The essays on literature focus on: The immorality of competitive literary individualism – Twentieth-century poetry – Her own poetry and its sequel in her testament The Telling (1972) – The question of her influence; poetry contrasted with philosophy and religion – The novel – Her judgements of writers such as Coleridge and contemporaries such as Stein – The essays on life focus on: Human identity as centred to ‘soul’ – Women’s active unselfishness – Polity and spirituality – Liberalism’s moral indeterminacy – The ascendancy of professionalized specialisms, eg mathematical intellectualism, and its implications for general thinking – Imagination – Myth – Friendship, love, death, good and evil.

The Author: Laura (Riding) Jackson worked first as a poet in her native USA, where she was associated with the Fugitives, then in Europe, collaborating as poet and critic with Robert Graves among others. Not long after her return to America in 1939, she renounced poetry, judging it an artificial substitute for natural truth-speaking. There followed two decades devoted to the study of language with her husband Schuyler B. Jackson, crowned by three prolific decades of renewed writing and publishing activity. Laura (Riding) Jackson died in 1991.The Editors: John Nolan is editor of Laura (Riding) Jackson’s The Failure Of Poetry; The Promise Of Language. Alan J. Clark is her authorized bibliographer, and his check-list of her work appeared in Chelsea 69 (2000); he has co-edited her books First Awakenings and The Word «Woman», and was text-editor of The Poems of Laura Riding (2001). The editors are members of the author’s board of literary executors; their several respective contributions on her work have appeared in the UK, USA, Japan, and Brazil.

«…ce recueil de textes devra figurer dans la bibliothèque de celles et de ceux qui s’interrogent à propos du sens de la modernité poétique anglo-saxonne.» (Alain Suberchicot, Transatlantica)

• Contents: The essays on language focus on: The importance of knowledge of words – The harmful effects of science-inspired approaches to language, eg structuralism – The relations between language, reason, thought, mind, spirit – The essays on literature focus on: The immorality of competitive literary individualism – Twentieth-century poetry – Her own poetry and its sequel in her testament The Telling (1972) – The question of her influence; poetry contrasted with philosophy and religion – The novel – Her judgements of writers such as Coleridge and contemporaries such as Stein – The essays on life focus on: Human identity as centred to ‘soul’ – Women’s active unselfishness – Polity and spirituality – Liberalism’s moral indeterminacy – The ascendancy of professionalized specialisms, eg mathematical intellectualism, and its implications for general thinking – Imagination – Myth – Friendship, love, death, good and evil.