644
PARTISAN REVIEW
that grand old man of English letters, Robert Graves, have obscured
not only her influence on them, but her original contribution to
literary criticism.
Joyce Wexler documents in detail Laura Riding's method of
close textual analysis, her influence on Southern Fugitives Ransom
and Tate, who admired her and boasted of her association with
them, and the development of her argument in
A Survey ofModernist
Poetry
(1927), written with Graves. William Empson claims the book
was the inspiration for his famous
Seven Types of Ambiguity.
Wexler
has rescued one of
thos~
"stranded ghosts" from literary obscurity
and told a fascinating story
,,:S
well . Irony is a game of both history
and poetry. For the timing of a Riding revival coincides with the re–
bellion of feminist critics against the too-formal demands of New
Critical exegesis. Will we be forced to acknowledge that it was
a woman who invented that Chinese footbinding of the critical
imagination?
The book raises many provocative questions, not the least of
which are biographical. "Riding's poems portray a mind locked in
combat with words and winning," Wexler writes. And so they do.
But where did such an original mind come from? How did aJewish
girl from Brooklyn, Laura Riechenthal from Girls' High, in fact
become Laura Riding, the queen of modernist poetry, reigning over
the Seizin Press and disciples throughout the twenties and thirties in
London and Mallorca? Her scepter was invisible but she actually
wore a gold wire crown which spelled out LAURA, reports one of
the poets , and no one found it odd at all.
Naming names is, of course, what poetry is all about. "I alone
say.!I alone am not 1./1 am my name.!My name is not my
name,lMy name is the name. " This puzzling "truth-telling" is
Riding's definition of the poetic act . And though she will not admit
comparisons, that poem was clearly begotten by a literary daughter
of Emily Dickinson, another truth-teller, but one who demanded
that the poet "Tell the truth but tell it slant" for "the Truth must
dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind ."
Riding, however, did not want the truth of her poems to dazzle
gradually and has been impatient with the blindness of critics. Her
Jewish socialist father had wanted her to be an American Rosa
Luxemburg. But Laura Riechenthal went from Girls' High to
Cornell, briefly married a history instructor and became Laura
Gottschalk, went to New York to write poetry, where the admiring
Hart Crane called her "Rideshalk-Godding" and then, cooling at her
