"Your Majesty's Self Is But a Ceremony": Laura (Riding) Jackson, Emerson, and the Conduct of Life

For Laura (Riding) Jackson, the act of self-disclosure was, from her earliest work of the nineteen-twenties to her work of the seventies and eighties, as fundamental as it was to Ralph Waldo Emerson. In her 1928 collection of essays, Anarchism Is Not Enough, (Riding) Jackson works through some characteristic contradictions of modernism to the point of affirming a radical dualism of self and society such that the social in any form spells the destruction of the truth that appears suddenly in the form of the authenticity of the original self. This truth has no consequences for social or political life whatsoever; measured entirely by the experience of the poet in the act of making a poem, it is purely aesthetic in being an end in itself. This radical commitment to a self-disclosure unconcerned with the disclo-