48 - Three twentieth-century women poets: Riding, Smith, Plath

Summary

In 1934, in common with thirty-nine other poets, Laura Riding was sent six questions by the editor of New Verse, Geoffrey Grigson. A collection of responses, hers among them, were published in the magazine on 11 October. Grigson’s final question was: ‘As a poet what distinguishes you, do you think, from an ordinary man?’ Riding responds: ‘As a poet I am distinguished from ordinary men, first, in that I am a woman’. She goes on: ‘poetry has been a male cult – where the mysteries were verse-rehearsals in sublimity. Those practice days are, however, over: poetry is now a direct matter.’ Nervelessly confirming herself as the only ‘other-than-male voic[e]’, she concludes drily, ‘But one woman goes a long way – in any capacity.’

Both the eldest and the longest-lived of the three poets treated here, the American-born Riding can be said to have gone a long way in various respects. As Robert Nye testifies, this vital poet – first published in 1923 – was still writing a matter of weeks before she died aged ninety in 1991. Her partnership with Robert Graves, which began in the twenties and ceased as World War II threatened, afforded her lasting fame in literary circles, although she would never achieve Graves’s stature. However, as most commentators emphasise, Riding earned widespread respect on both sides of the Atlantic for the influence she exerted on English poetry and letters between the wars. This extended beyond her productive collaboration with Graves on the Seizin Press, the publishing house they co-founded in 1928 and ran from their Mallorcan home until 1938; Epilogue, the journal they set up and co-edited; and several co-authored critical works, not least A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), the project that first brought Riding over to England at Graves’s urging. There was also Riding’s own critical writing, including The Word Woman, which, Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark note, anticipated Simone de Beauvoir by almost two decades.