Brings together four decades of largely unpublished work by Jackson, exploring the rationale for her renunciation of poetry in 1941 after two decades as a poet

Existing only in manuscript since the 1940s but enjoying an underground reputation among friends and advocates, this primary document by one of the most original and influential of American poets and thinkers is now being published as Rational Meaning, Laura (Riding) Jackson's testament of the necessity of living for truth. Begun as a dictionary and thesaurus in the 1930s, the work developed into a fundamental reevaluation of language itself. Riding, in close collaboration with her husband, continued this monumental project over the succeeding decades, completing it after his death in 1968. At the core of Rational Meaning, which aims to restore the truth of language by arguing that meaning inheres in words, stands the idea that a total renovation of the knowledge of language is needed, not to develop mere verbal sophistication and respectability but fundamentally to reinvigorate the intellectual processes of consciousness. The book reveals the disastrous extent to which language has been "unlearned" and shows how it may be learned again. Rational Meaning will be essential reading, not only for students of literature but for radical-minded linguists and lexicographers unhappy with the orthodoxies current in their disciplines.

This impressive volume provides over 1,700 biographical entries on poets writing in English from 1910 to the present day, including T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Carol Ann Duffy. Authoritative and accessible, it is a must-have for students of English and creative writing, as well as for anyone with an interest in poetry.

This book takes up the utopian desire for a perfect language of words that give direct expression to the real, known in Western thought as Cratylism, and its impact on the social visions and poetic projects of three of the most intellectually ambitious of American writers: Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson.

Writing Not Writing is both a detailed analysis of four individual poets who left poetry behind and a theoretically provocative exploration of the political and ethical possibilities of silence, not-doing, and disavowal. Reading the silences of George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Bob Kaufman, the renunciation of Laura Riding, and other more contemporary instances and modes of poetic abnegation, Tom Fisher explores silence, refusal, and disavowal as political and ethical modes of response in a time of continuous crisis. Through a turn away from writing, these poets offer strategies of refusal and departure that leave anagrammatical hollows behind, activating the negational capacities of writing and aesthetics to disrupt the empire of sense, speech, and agency.

This book argues that Coleridge's most important philosophical ideas were expressed not through theoretical argument but through his poems.

"Difficult Ornaments is a book about six twentieth-century American poets, the mythical Florida they explored, and the American tropical style they created. Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and Harry Mathews compose a chain of friendship and influence. Only Laura (Riding) Jackson stands apart as a poet who renounced poetry and became a recluse on a citrus farm. In proximity to the tropics-nature's own laboratory of invention and experiment-the more fecund and experimental their poetry became. The ornaments of poetry correspond to the ornaments of nature, which is why the peacock, that most decorated of birds, features so prominently their work. These seven essays comprise a lyrical meditation on literary style that ranges through history and myth, in order to better understand the relationship between persons and places, weather and language, the climate of the planet and the climate of the mind"--