Come, Words, Away": A View of Laura (Riding) Jackson's Poetic Theory

The present article is an attempt to introduce the reader to the poetic theory of Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991), who is almost completely unknown in Iran, and still little known even in her home country America. It studies her journey from writing poetry intensely for two decades (1920’s and 1930’s) to stopping writing poetry for the rest of her life. The article would serve at least two purposes. One is to introduce the reader to a poet of very high calibre who played a very important role both in poetic modernism and the emergence of one of the most significant critical approaches of the twentieth century: the New Criticism. The second is to understand a very crucial view of literary and poetic language in twentieth-century poetic modernism. This involves engagement in complicated discussions of visual and aural aesthetics as related to poetic language. A useful matrix to highlight the main features of her poetic theory is comparing her poetic and critical ideas with those of the New Critics and I. A. Richards (1893-1979).