Laura Riding

Laura Riding (1901-01-16 – 1991-09-02) was a controversial modernist American poet and literary critic, associated initially with the Fugitives and later with Robert Graves. She was born Laura Reichenthal, and her married names were Laura Riding Gottschalk and Laura (Riding) Jackson.

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• The wind suffers of blowing
  The sea suffers of water
  And fire suffers of burning,
  And I of a living name.
  • "The Wind Suffers" from The Collected Poems of Laura Riding (London: Cassell; New York: Random House, 1938)

• Because most people are not sufficiently employed in themselves, they run about loose, hungering for employment, and satisfy themselves in various supererogatory occupations. The easiest of these occupations, which have all to do with making things already made, is the making of people: it is called the art of friendship.
  • "The Myth" from Anarchism Is not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

• There is a weakling music and a weakling poetry which flatter each other by making critical comparisons with each other: there is a literary criticism of music in which words like ‘wit’ and ‘rhetoric’ excuse musical flabbiness and a musical criticism of poetry in which words like ‘symphonic’ and ‘overtone’ excuse poetic flabbiness.
  • "Poetry and Music" from Anarchism Is not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

• Shakespeare alternated between musical surrenders to social prestige and magnificent fits of poetic remorse.
  • "Poetry and Music" from Anarchism Is not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

• I feel an intense intimacy with those who have this loathing interest in me. Further than this, I know what they mean, I sympathize with them, I understand them. There should be a name (as poetic as love) for this relationship between loather and loathed; it is of the closest and more full of passion than incest.
  • "How it came about?" from Anarchism Is not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928

• All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents.
  • "All Literature", from Anarchism Is not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

• We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves: it is all criticism of criticism.
  • "The Corpus", from Anarchism Is not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

• The child begins with crude sex alone. It innocently indulges itself in sensual pleasures. It loves kissing and to be kissed, stroking and to be stroked, fondly contemplating its excretions. The civilized society into which it is born magnifies the importance of these insignificant local sensations, gives them intellectual depth. It creates a handsome receptacle, love, to contain the humours of this unnaturally enlarged instinct.
  • "The Damned Thing", from Anarchism Is not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

• Woman has been too much under the necessity of self-preservation to lay down the weapons of feminine personality and risk the disarmed independence of sexual impersonality. She is the object, or prey, of male sexuality, and her strength lies in the pride and in the obstacles with which she conditions her capture.
  • "The Damned Thing", from Anarchism Is not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

• Woman is the symbol to man of the uncleanness of bodily existence, of which he purifies himself by putting her to noble uses. She thus has for him a double, contradictory significance; she is the subject of his bawdry and the subject of his romance.
  • "The Damned Thing", from Anarchism Is not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

• Polygamy and polyandry distribute the frightening physical solidarity of monogamy. Monogamous couples are always hungry for company: to dilute sex.
  • "The Damned Thing", from Anarchism Is not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

• The terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ must be understood as representing no more primitive opposition of sex to sex; but as defining two worlds of differing quality, in either of which men and women may jointly move and live.
  • "A Personal Letter, With a Request for a Reply", January 1937

• Daisy was a consciously happy young woman without any of the usual endowments that make for conscious happiness, money apart. She was not pretty, she was not clever, she had no friends, no talents, nor even an imagination to make her think she was happy when she was really miserable. As she was never miserable, she had no need of an imagination.
  • "Daisy and Venison" from Progress of Stories (Deya, Majorca: Seizin Press; London, Constable, 1935)

• She [Venison] had never travelled and so could invent all kinds of strange places without being limited, as travelled people are, by knowledge of certain places only.
  • "Daisy and Venison" from Progress of Stories (Deya, Majorca: Seizin Press; London, Constable, 1935)

• Her one serious failing was that she could not write above love. She could not write a story with more than one important character in it, whom she thought of for the moment as herself; with love there had to be at least two important characters.
  • "Daisy and Venison" from Progress of Stories (Deya, Majorca: Seizin Press; London, Constable, 1935)

• What second love could she make out of her ruined first love? The second love that most women make out of their first love for husbands grows from a mutual and tacit sadness in both husband and wife that he is only in rare moments the man both would like him to be.
  • Lives of Wives (London: Cassell, 1939)

• Every woman must live by some sense of victory over disappointments, and Olympias was not the sort of woman to find compensation in her own powers of self-control and endurance.
  • Lives of Wives (London: Cassell, 1939)

• 'God' is the name given to the most ‘important’ human idea. In English, as in other languages, the original sense of the word is obscure. But the character of the name is the same in all languages: it is a question. 'God' is the question 'Is there something more important than, something besides, man?'
  • "The Idea of God" from Essays from Epilogue (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001)

• I would then say that there are two kinds of feeling. The first is to feel in the sense of concentrating your emotions on something immediately available for your understanding: you make your understanding out of the emotions you have about it. The second is to feel in the sense of being affected without trying to understand: something is felt, you do not know what, and it is more important to feel it than to try to understand it, since once you try to understand it you no longer feel it.
  • "The Idea of God" from Essays from Epilogue (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001)

• Women from earliest times have been used as conveniences of communication with unseen, inaccessible powers, but always in the sense that such exposing of self to dangerous mysteries, such destruction of the understanding as was required to become the slave of unseen powers, did not matter because the communicant was only a woman, in herself an undetermined cipher – a nothing.
  • "The Idea of God" from Essays from Epilogue (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001)

• Anger is precious because it is an immediate, undeniable clue to what our minds (so much more cautious in rejection and resistance than our bodies) will not tolerate.
  • "In Defence of Anger" from Essays from Epilogue (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001)

• The object of all religious activity is to mingle the human and the non-human, and the lower gods represent that which is cast back to the human from the non-human – human gods merely, practice-gods who embody the errors which man makes in first conceiving the non-human.
  • "The Bull-Fight" from Essays from Epilogue (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001)

• There is a sense of life so real that it becomes the sense of something more real than life…It is the meaning at work in what has no meaning; it is, at its clearest, poetry.
  • Contemporaries and Snobs (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), opening words.

• Bodies have had their day.
  • Stanley J. Kunitz et al. (eds.), Authors Today and Yesterday (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1933) p. 565

• Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth. Poetic art cheats truth to further and finer degrees than art of any other kind because the spoken word is its exclusive medium.
  • Preface to Selected Poems (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973).

• 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 as long as may be needed to make sense clear causes many a set of words actually deficient in linguistic workmanship to pass for an eloquent brevity.
  • "The Promise of Words" in London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 17, p.23

• The rhythmic pattern of the poem, which forces continuity of attention – incites a pleasurable compulsion to ‘follow’ – is either a tried metrical suasion-contrivance or a specially invented pattern of physical insistences, equally, if not more, binding in its effect on the reader. From a straight linguistic point of view, there is room for wonder if there is not latent vice in this environment in which pleasurable physically-compelled responses, produced by incidents of poetic utterance, are identified with the Good.
  • "The Promise of Words" in London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 17, p.23