Laura Riding Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Early Life
Laura Riding was born Laura Reichenthal in 1901 in New York City to immigrant parents. Growing up in a multilingual, intellectually active household, she developed an early alertness to how words shape meaning. She began writing as a teenager, gravitating toward the concentrated, truth-seeking possibilities of poetry. From the beginning, her poetry aimed less at ornament than at stripping away falsity in language, a focus that would define both her artistic practice and later theoretical work.

Education and First Publications
As a young woman she pursued university studies and quickly found a literary footing among serious contemporaries. In the early 1920s she married the historian Louis Gottschalk; the marriage ended later in the decade, and she began publishing as Laura Riding. Her poems and essays drew the attention of the Southern modernist circle known as the Fugitives, whose magazine, The Fugitive, provided an early forum for her work. Through exchanges with writers such as John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, she sharpened her understanding of poetic exactitude and critical method, though her commitments remained distinctly her own.

Partnership with Robert Graves
In the mid-1920s Riding left the United States for England at the invitation of Robert Graves and his then-wife Nancy Nicholson. Riding and Graves forged a close intellectual and personal partnership that would shape interwar modernism. Together they wrote A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), a probing, example-driven book that modeled a method of close reading influential on later critics; its attention to verbal nuance famously helped inspire William Empson's approach to ambiguity in poetry. With Graves she also wrote A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928), arguing that anthologies distort poetic value by wrenching work from its living context. During this period her own volumes, including The Close Chaplet and Love as Love, Death as Death, announced a voice dedicated to saying exactly what could be said, and not a syllable more.

Mallorca and the Seizin Press
The Riding-Graves circle experienced dramatic strains at the end of the 1920s, including Riding's entanglement with the Irish poet Geoffrey Phibbs, which culminated in a notorious window-leap that nearly cost her life and marked those around her. Afterward, Riding and Graves left London for Deià, Mallorca, where they ran the Seizin Press, an adventurous small press that printed their own and others' work and served as a crucible for literary experiment. Mallorca gave Riding the space to extend her prose and critical writing, including the innovative Progress of Stories, and to clarify the standards by which she believed language could be used truthfully.

Exile, Separation, and Collected Poems
The Spanish Civil War forced the closure of their Mallorcan life. Riding and Graves departed; their partnership, intense and generative but fraught, finally ended soon after. In 1938 she published Collected Poems, a volume she regarded as the definitive gathering of her poetry. Even as it appeared, she was moving toward a radical conclusion: that poetry, as commonly conceived, could not bear the weight of the truth she sought to tell. This position, controversial then and now, was not a repudiation of her own poems so much as a challenge to the poetic idea of truth as beauty; she wanted language to be accountable to truth first.

Renunciation of Poetry and Work with Schuyler Jackson
In the United States she found a new kind of partnership with Schuyler B. Jackson, whom she married. With him she pursued a long, exacting inquiry into the foundations of meaning in English, living a largely private life in Florida. She often styled her name as Laura (Riding) Jackson to register continuity with her earlier work while asserting her later commitment. Together, she and Jackson labored for decades on a comprehensive project to detach definition from habit and cliché and to build what they regarded as rational meaning from the ground up. Portions of this effort appeared late or posthumously, but the undertaking shaped everything she wrote after her renunciation of poetry. Along the way she published The Telling, a prose work that seeks to communicate truth without rhetorical evasions, consistent with her insistence that words must be equal to what they claim to say.

Relations with Contemporaries
Riding's life intersected in decisive ways with prominent figures. Robert Graves remained a central counterparty, their collaboration having transformed his critical outlook and, many argue, his poetic aims. Nancy Nicholson was part of the charged domestic and artistic arrangement that surrounded them in the late 1920s. Geoffrey Phibbs, briefly drawn into their circle, catalyzed personal crises that would return in memoirs and biographical accounts. Earlier, the Fugitives had provided Riding with a proving ground for her earliest critical positions. Later, Schuyler Jackson offered the collaborative patience necessary for the painstaking lexicographic-philosophical work she came to see as her principal task.

Later Years and Legacy
Riding lived quietly for many years, guarding the integrity of her texts and resisting what she saw as misreadings or simplifications of her work. She was wary of anthologies and selective reprintings that, in her view, perpetuated a false sense of what poems mean in isolation. She did, however, authorize some reissues and oversaw renewed presentations of her writing as her reputation grew again in the 1960s and after. She died in Florida in 1991.

Today Laura Riding occupies a distinctive place in twentieth-century letters: a modernist poet of fierce clarity who published a final, unflinching Collected Poems and then walked away from poetry to pursue the harder problem of truth-telling in language. Her critical collaboration with Robert Graves helped shape the practice of attentive reading central to later criticism; her fiction and essays questioned the complacencies of literary form; and her late philosophical-linguistic work, undertaken with Schuyler Jackson, sought to reconstruct meaning itself. She remains a touchstone for writers and scholars who suspect that the ethical fate of literature rests not in style or tradition alone, but in the uncompromised truth that words make possible.

Our collection contains 11 quotes who is written by Laura, under the main topics: Truth - Friendship - Deep - Art - Poetry.