SOURCE: Heuving, Jeanne. “Laura (Riding) Jackson's ‘Really New’ Poem.” In Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers, edited by Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano, pp. 191-213. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Heuving explores the relationship between Riding's poetics and her gender critiques and addresses the poet's place in literary history.

Although Laura (Riding) Jackson's work has been highly acclaimed by many prominent twentieth-century poets and intellectuals, she has not received the concerted critical attention she deserves.¹ While the reasons for this disregard are complex, (Riding) Jackson has decisively contributed to her own neglect.² Objecting to the ways that anthologies misrepresent poets' larger works, (Riding) Jackson routinely refused to have her work anthologized. Further, until her death in 1991, she publicly attacked even her most sympathetic critics, meticulously correcting their mistakes in lengthy critical commentary. For (Riding) Jackson, any frame of reference falsified the precise...