SOURCE: Temes, Peter S. “Code of Silence: Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Refusal to Speak.” PMLA 109, no. 1 (January 1994): 87-99.

In the following essay, Temes discusses Riding's rejection of her poetic voice in 1942, and argues that the “repudiation of her critics links Riding's renunciation of poetry with the ideas that drive her poems.”

In 1942 Laura (Riding) Jackson complicated her reputation as a poet by emphatically rejecting poetry—her own included.¹ Where she had once believed poetry a moral force, offering through the properly resonant combination of sound and meaning a link among individuals, she later found the medium full of promise and sensation but utterly lacking in connective moral substance. Poetry became, for her, a “self-contradictory field of linguistic expression.”²

(Riding) Jackson achieved a certain authority through her rejection, casting out along with her poems the vulnerability that attends statement, refusing the risk of becoming the object of someone...