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Code of Silence: Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Refusal to Speak

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Peter S. Temes
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Abstract

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.

Type
Special Topic: Literature and Censorship
Information
PMLA , Volume 109 , Issue 1: Special Topic Literature and Censorship , January 1994 , pp. 87 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1994

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References

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