Laura Riding Jackson (January 16, 1901 – September 2, 1991) was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer.
A child should be allowed to take as long as she needs for knowing everything about herself, which is the same as learning to be herself. Even twenty-five years if necessary, or even forever. And it wouldn't matter if doing things got delayed, because nothing is really important but being oneself.
To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth…but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.
Women, ever since there have been women, have had a way of being people.
Women are strangers in the country of man.
My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.
Woman has two works to perform: a work of differentiation, of man from herself, and a work of unification, of man with herself. . . . We, woman, are now entering upon our second work.
The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind. . . The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.
The new "ambiguity" means, in a way adjudged favorable to literary, poetic, intellectually and psychologically well-devised and praiseworthily executed linguistic performance, uncertainty of meaning, or difficulty for the interpreter in identifying just what the meaning in question is: it means the old meanings of ambiguity with a difference. It means uncertainty of meaning (of a word or combination of words) purposefully incorporated in a literary composition for the attainment of the utmost possible variety of meaning-play compressible within the verbal limits of the composition.
When. . . I comprehended that poetry had no provision in it for ultimate practical attainment of the rightness of work that is truth, but led on ever only to a temporizing less- than-truth. . . I stopped.
I believe that misconceptions about oneself that one does not correct where possible act as a bad magic.
Much of the magical effect that poetry gives of rendering everything it touches pellucid comes from the necessity of compression that it imposes. The impossibility of pausing in poetry as long as may be needed to make sense clear causes many a set of words actually deficient in linguistic workmanship to pass for an eloquent brevity.
When modernist poetry, or what not so long ago passed for modernist poetry, can reach the stage where the following piece by Mr. Ezra Pound is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the plain reader and orthodox critic who shrinks from anything that may be labelled 'modernist' either in terms of condemnation or approbation. . . . Better he thinks, that ten authentic poets should be left for posterity to discover than one charlatan should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame.