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If censorship is a charged topic, self-censorship presents a further polemical complexity. Around 1942, the poet Laura Riding, later signing herself Laura (Riding) Jackson, made the surprising move to reject all poetry, including her own, “casting out along with her poems the vulnerability that attends statement.” She also refused others' interpretations of her poems and later prevented the reprinting of her own poetry. As Temes argues, in this way Jackson was able to wrest artistic control from the critics by refusing to write (a pre-emptive strategy of withholding, and perhaps a form of passive aggression as well).
Jackson's poems criticized the patriarchy, from social mores to her relationship with Robert Graves, yet Temes points out the “closed system of self-justification” in her own writings. Analyzing poems such as “Back to the Mother Breast,” he notes the images of “Clean bone” instead of milk, with “the vague infant cheek/Turned away to speak.” Herein lies a rejection of maternal oneness in favor of a move toward language and individuation. Such, at least, is the substance of things hoped for. In “Memories of Mortalities,” the longest of Jackson's pieces in the 1938 Collected Poems, the “I” and “you” initially represent the female voice and the male domination of the father, and though the speaker finally attains a moment of separation and empowerment, the period is transitory. Jackson did return to writing in the 1970's, but as a critic commenting on her own and others' work, as an analyst examining the tensions between art and society.