Move over, Polonius!

Laura Riding, sometime poet and citrus-grower has risen from the grave to deliver this series of attacks on poetry and its untruthfulness. She comes back to us now in a posthumous gathering of essays and shorter notes, The Failure of Poetry: The Promise of Language. It will certainly get people’s backs up.

There is something very strange about this collection of her essays and fragments, for all their clarity of diction: a weighting which I would have to call obsessive. She was obsessed with something about her writing that was entirely beyond the poetic, even in the years when she was a poet. Thus she claims that ‘The whole, in my work, could be characterized as an aliveness that believed in itself as containable in words, entirely, believing in words at the same time as containing it. Nothing like this had ever happened in poetry.’

Mere poetry is something far less than this ‘whole’. She saw it as having become, in recent centuries, something ingenious, overvalued, painless, inevitably captured in a ‘frame of solemnified linguistic frivolity’.