Laura Riding (1901–1991) American poet, critic, and theorist of language, born Laura Reichenthal in New York City to a Polish-Jewish immigrant family. She attended Cornell University, where she began writing poetry and briefly married Louis Gottschalk, adopting the name Laura Riding Gottschalk before shortening it to Laura Riding. In the early 1920s she associated with the Fugitive poets in Nashville (John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren), winning the group's Nashville Prize and publishing in The Fugitive magazine, though she remained something of an outsider to the circle. In 1926 she moved to England and formed a close personal and literary partnership with the poet Robert Graves. Together they founded the Seizin Press and co-wrote the influential critical work A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), which is credited with pioneering techniques of close reading later associated with New Criticism. She and Graves also lived for a period in Mallorca, Spain, until the Spanish Civil War forced their return to England. Riding was a prolific and formally rigorous poet, publishing collections such as The Close Chaplet (1926), Poems: A Joking Word (1930), and her Collected Poems (1938). She also wrote fiction, including Progress of Stories (1935), and extensive criticism. In 1939 she returned to the United States, ended her partnership with Graves, and married the poet and citrus grower Schuyler B. Jackson. Around this time she made the striking decision to renounce poetry altogether, believing verse to be an inadequate vehicle for truth, and devoted the remainder of her career to a philosophical and linguistic project aimed at a definitive, non-poetic use of language — culminating in the posthumously assembled Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words (1997), written with Jackson. Under the name Laura (Riding) Jackson, she continued to publish essays and correspondence defending her ideas about language and her legacy. She died in 1991 in Sebastian, Florida. Her work has since been reassessed as a major, if idiosyncratic, contribution to modernist poetics and literary theory, influencing later poets and critics despite her own repudiation of poetry.
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