Reading Renunciation: Laura Riding and the End of Poetry

Laura Riding renounced the writing of poetry sometime shortly after the publication of her Collected Poems in 1938. She variously indicates the reasons for this refusal in her post-poetry writing, most typically explaining that poetry contains an "absolute incompatibility" between what she calls its "creed" and its "craft." For Riding, then, her renunciation is mandated by an essential character of poetry, rather than determined or shaped by historical or cultural contexts. In this essay, I attempt to read Riding's refusal against or alongside her own arguments and suggest the ways in which her departure from poetry was precipitated by a reading of modernism as both the fulfillment and undoing of what she considered poetry's promise and possibility. Also, with reference to Maurice Blanchot, George Bataille and Jean-Luc Nancy's reading of Rimbaud, I argue that Riding's renunciation is a refusal of "poetry as philosophy" that, rather than putting an end to poetry, extends its possibilities. I conclude my essay with a discussion, by way of Jerome McGann, of Riding and her relationship to the Language Poets.