LOVER OF ROBER GRAVES ATTEMPTED SUICIDE IN 1927 SAID SHE WOULD NEVER WRITE ANOTHER POEM

A POEM : HOW A POEM CAME TO BE. A Lovely BROADSIDE POEM by LAURA RIDING JACKSON.

SIGNED by LAURA RIDING JACKSON at the end of her poem, beneath her printed name.

Published by [Lord John Press, 1980]. Presentation Copy - Presentation Copies are normally printed prior to numbered copies, making them quite hard to find. Subsequently printed in a limited edition of only 150 numbered copies.

Broadside, printed on fine heavy stock paper, deckled top and bottom edges, 15x22 inches.

NEAR FINE condition, a bright and beautiful copy. Would look great mounted and/or framed.

From the Broadside: "Within a very few years of the publication of my Collected Poems (1938)... I renounced further trying the way of poetry... saying: I would write no more poems - and I wrote no more poems... (however) I wrote for (a close friend), in the 1978 Christmastime, a poem, marked as a poem for him only, giving it the title HOW A POEM CAME TO BE. I kept no copy of this privately written and given poem, and forgot the writing and the giving of it... I chanced, recently, to tell my friend of receiving a request for a poem to publish in broadside form from the Lord John Press, indicating my feeling some surprise that Mr. Yellin, the Press's director, should not have been aware that FOR FORTY YEARS there had been NO NEW POEMS of mine. But my friend reminded me that about a year ago there HAD been a new poem - the one I wrote for him; and he urged me to let him release it to me from its private status of being a poem for him only... I give here the poem, given him, to be out in the world..."

LAURA RIDING JACKSON, 1901-1991, was an iconoclastic American Poet. She left New England at the age of 25 to live with ROBERT GRAVES and his wife, Nancy Nicholson. The triangle did not suit her, and Laura Riding tried to commit suicide in 1927. Thereafter Robert Graves divorced his wife and lived together with Laura Riding in Majorca, France, England and Switzerland, and even went with her when she returned to the United States. They bitterly broke up in 1939. In 1941 Laura Riding Jackson renounced poetry, married Schuyler B. Jackson, and lived quietly with him in Wabasso, Florida, until her death in 1991. In the 60s, 70s and 80s she wrote a number of pieces explaining her reasons for renouncing poetry, but no poetry. This is apparently THE ONLY POEM written by Laura Riding Jackson since 1941.

You can read much more about LAURA RIDING on Wikipedia and elsewhere on the Internet.

This Large and Lovely BROADSIDE will be shipped carefully rolled in a sturdy mailing tube.