Collected Prose

statement about poetry, because, at heart, neither one is about poetry. Laura Riding is clearly interested in problems that extend beyond the scope of poetry, and by dwelling on these problems as if they were poetry’s exclusive concerns, she only confuses the issue. She did not renounce poetry because of any objective inadequacy in poetry itself — for it is no more or less adequate than any other human activity — but because poetry as she conceived of it was no longer capable of saying what she wanted to say. She now feels that she had “reached poetry’s limit.” But what really happened, it would seem, is that she had reached her own limit in poetry.
    It is appropriate, then, that her work since 1938 has been largely devoted to a more general investigation of language, and when we come to The Telling we find a deeper discussion of many of the same questions she had tried to formulate in her poetry. The book, which fits into no established literary category, is positively Talmudic in structure. “The Telling” itself is a short text of less than fifty pages, divided into numbered paragraphs, originally written for an issue of the magazine Chelsea in 1967. To this “core-text” which is written in a dense, highly abstract prose almost totally devoid of outside references, she has added a series of commentaries, commentaries on commentaries, notes, and addenda, which flesh out many of the earlier conclusions and treat of various literary, political, and philosophical matters. It is an astonishing display of a consciousness confronting and examining itself. Based on the idea that “the human utmost is marked out in a linguistic utmost,” she pursues an ideal of “humanly perfect word-use” (as opposed to “artistically perfect word-use”), by which she aims to uncover the essential nature of being. Again, or rather still, she is straining toward absolutes, toward an unshakable and unified vision of the world: “… the nature of our being is not to be known as we know the weather, which is by the sense of the momentary. Weather is all change, while our being, in its human nature, is all constancy … it is to be known only by the sense of the constant.” Although Laura (Riding) Jackson has put her former poet self in parentheses, she looks upon The Telling as the successful continuation of her efforts as a poet: “To speak as I speak in it, say such things as I say in it, was part of my hope as a poet.”
    The first paragraph of The Telling sets forth the substance of the problem that she confronts in the rest of the book:
    There is something to be told about us for the telling of which we all wait. In our unwilling ignorance we hurry to listen to stories of old human life, new human life, fancied human life, avid of something to while away the time of unanswered curiosity. We know we are explainable, and not explained. Many of the lesser things concerning us have been told but the greater things have not been told; and nothing can fill their place. Whatever we learn of what is not ourselves, but ours to know, being of our universal world, will likewise leave the emptiness an emptiness. Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it.

    What immediately strikes us here is the brilliance of the writing itself. The quiet urgency and strong, cadenced phrasing entice us to go on listening. It seems that we are about to be told something radically different from anything we have ever been told before, and of such fundamental importance that it would be in our best interests to pay careful attention to what follows. “We know we are explainable, and not explained.” In the subsequent paragraphs we are shown why the various human disciplines — science, religion, philosophy, history, poetry — have not and cannot explain us. Suddenly, everything has been swept aside; the way seems to have been cleared for a totally fresh approach to things. And yet, when she reaches the point of offering her own explanations, we are once again presented with the mysterious and unbelievable Platonism we had encountered before. It seems, finally, as if she were rejecting the myth-making tendencies of previous thought only in order to present another myth of her own devising — a myth of memory, a faith in the capacity of human beings to remember a time of wholeness that preceded the existence of individual selves. “May our Manyness become