The Close Chaplet

Laura Riding

The Close Chaplet is Laura Riding’s first book, long out of print, originally published in 1926. Riding deliberately ceased writing poems after 1940, when she came to see poetry as irrevocably flawed as a means of expression. These poems demonstrate Riding’s early desire to depart from “the close and well-tilled ground” of traditional lyric poetry. 

In his introduction, Mark Jacobs writes that Riding “identifies herself with the pre-moment, the ‘what was there’ before Creation.” From this she begins to develop a theory about the role of women as the origin of all human beings, the only animals with written language. This edition also includes Riding’s essay “A Prophecy or a Plea,” a statement of her poetics initially published in the same year.