394 Making It New: 1900–1945lamenting this unreal world we now inhabit, “World, not yet one ... / ... / A world
of the shadow and alone.”
Laura (Riding) Jackson began from a very different base to Rukeyser and moved,
eventually, in a very different direction, even though she too was guided by the
visionary impulse. She was an honorary member of the Fugitive group for a while,
sharing with them a strong commitment to poetic discipline and, with Tate in
particular, a certain chilly intensity. However, she was hardly interested in their
verbal variety and dexterity, and had visionary, even absolutist poetic aims. “A poem,”
Laura (Riding) Jackson says in the preface to her 1938 Collected Poems, “is an uncov-
ering of truth of so fundamental and general a kind that no other name besides
poetry is adequate except truth.” Inspired by a passionate search for what she called
“an ultimate of perfect truth,” she rejected metaphorical language, verbal ambiguity,
or anything that as she saw it failed to illuminate the object or idea.
“A most improbable one it takes / To tell what is so,” she declares in “The Way It
Is”; and this idea of the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of telling “what is so” recurs
throughout her poetry, even while she is trying to tell it. Sometimes it results in a
desperate resort to paradox (“One self, one manyness”), oxymoron or simple
self-contradiction (“The strangeness is not strange”), as if the poet were trying to
cancel definitions out as she uses them. Sometimes, and not unrelated to this, she
narrows her focus down to one, very specific example of the difficulties of telling,
as in “Beyond,” where she insists: “Pain is impossible to describe / Pain is the
impossibility of describing / Describing what is impossible to describe.” (Riding)
Jackson wanted to “describe” a reality that is as immediate and yet intangible, as
searingly present but incommunicable as, from experience, we know pain to be. In
the end, she felt that poetry could not help, because, as she put it, “truth begins
where poetry ends.” “My kind of seriousness,” she said, “in my looking to poetry
for the rescue of human life from the indignities it was capable of visiting upon
itself, led me to an eventual turning away from it as failing my kind of seriousness.”
Her desire that poetry should tell the truth about “the human reality ... the reality
of All, of which we are exponents”: this, she believed, had been frustrated. The
reason was simple: the currency in which poetry dealt was counterfeit. Far from
providing “for practical attainment of that rightness of word that is truth,” it
led only to “a temporising less-than-truth (... eked out with illusions of truth
produced by physical word-effects”). So she turned her attention to a work of
linguistics which would, she hoped, provide “a single terminology of truth.” It was
to be “a work that would help dissipate the confusion existing in the knowledge of
word- meanings,” something in which, she insisted, “all probity of word must start.”
“I was religious in my devotion to poetry,” she said. “But in saying this,” she added,
“I am thinking of religion as it is ... a will to know and to make known, the ultimate
knowledge”; and that – or rather, the equivalent of that – poetry had singularly
failed to be.
Unlike (Riding) Jackson, Hart Crane never lost his belief in the religious possibilities
of poetry. It became and remained for him a means of absolute vision: “theGGray_c04.indd 394ray_c 04 .indd 394 8 8/1/2011 7:53:54 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 54 AM