Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
By renouncing poetry in 1942, Laura (Riding) Jackson won a kind of authority over her critics and interpreters. Though silence as a poet was a high price to pay, (Riding) Jackson managed to insulate her poetry from critical representation by denying her assent to every interpreter's necessary assumption that her poems succeed at meaning something. Her renunciation mirrors the motion toward silence that animates a number of her poems, notably “Memories of Mortalities” and “Lucrece and Nara.” These poems, like (Riding) Jackson herself, use a final state of silence to insist on the authority of a woman's speaking voice, despite the critical appetites of others.