Laura Riding

Laura Riding, pseudonym Madeleine Vara, was born January. 16, 1901, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Sept. 2, 1991, Sebastian, Fla., American poet, critic, and prose writer who was influential among the literary avant-garde during the 1920s and ’30s and beyond.

From 1918 to 1921 Riding attended Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., and quickly her poetry began to gain attention. Early on she came to be published and praised by the Fugitives, a prominent group of Southern poets. Riding lived abroad from 1926 to 1939 with her associate and companion the poet and novelist Robert Graves; together they established the Seizin Press (1927–38) and published the journal Epilogue (1935–38). Their book A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927, reprinted 2002) developed ideas of close textual analysis that influenced Willaim Empson and the New Criticism.

In 1941 Riding married the poet and critic Schuyler B. Jackson, and until his death in 1968 they worked together on lexicographical studies. She completed their “Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words” in 1974, but it was not published until 1997. During this time Riding ceased to write poetry, which she renounced in the 1950s as being “inadequate.” Her Collected Poems, originally published in 1938, was issued in revised editions by Carcanet in 1980 and and by Persea Books in 2001.