Anarchism is Not Enough is a manifesto against systematic thinking, a difficult book by a famously difficult writer. For the scope of its critical imagination, it is the most radical work of Laura Riding's early period. This period extends from the end of 1925, when she left America for Europe and Robert Graves, to 1939, the year she returned to America, renounced any further writing of poetry, and soon after married Schuyler Jackson. Published in 1928, when Riding was twenty-seven, Anarchism is a kind of early autobiographia literaria. Long out of print and now available for the first time in paperback, this is one of the most imaginative and daring works of literary theory ever written by a modernist figure. Lisa Samuels's edition sets the work in its historical context and elucidates its central intellectual difficulties. Her introduction and notes are a valuable aid to an understanding of Riding's work.

Anarchism Is Not Enough

Riding, Laura

Samuels, Lisa

Reference

University of California Press

The books paired here make up the first collaborative study of 'Modernist' poetry by two of the twentieth century's most important and original poets. In "A Survey of Modernist Poetry", Laura Riding and Robert Graves produce a contemporary reaction to the early experimentation of writers such as Eliot, Pound and E.E.Cummings. Their close critical readings are deployed, along the way, in an engagement with Shakespeare's punctuation, issues of populism and elitism and an attempt to define - perhaps to invent - that elusive creature known as 'the common reader'. The Survey contains groundbreaking readings of modern poems and movements and is an illuminating and polemical account of the beginnings of modernism. It is an important resource but also a valuable critical text in the reception and development of modernist poetry in English. "A Pamphlet Against Anthologies" is an entertaining tirade against the perceived iniquities of the trade anthology. A statement of poetic integrity, it poses awkward questions about the production and consumption of art in the mass markets of twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

A survey of modernist poetry

Norwood Editions

Literature & Fiction

R. West

Lives of Wives

Jackson, Laura Riding

British & Irish

Carcanet Press

Letters written by the poet to an eight-year-old girl explain the difference between learning and knowing, the value of thinking, and the benefits of avoiding hypocrisy and pretension

Four Unposted Letters to Catherine

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Persea

Poems: A Joking Word (Laura (Riding) Jackson series)

Poetry

A Survey of Modernist Poetry: And a Pamphlet Against Anthologies

Fiction. Edited by George Fragopoulos. Introduction by Mark Jacobs and George Fragopoulos. A nearly impossible text to categorize--is it a collection of short stories, prose poems, manifestos or something else entirely?--EXPERTS ARE PUZZLED is one of Laura Riding's earliest and most intense examinations of poetry's and language's relationship to truth. In essayistic examinations such as the titular piece, "Introduction to a book on Money," and "An Address to America," Riding seeks to articulate a higher, more poetic notion of truth and truth telling, a project that would later result in her famous renunciation of poetry itself. As such, EXPERTS ARE PUZZLED stands as an essential text in better understanding why it is that Riding rejected poetry and stopped writing it altogether in the late 1930s. While excerpts and selections from EXPERTS have been published before, most notably in Riding's The Progress of Stories, the entirety of the collection has not appeared in print since its initial publication by Jonathan Cape in 1930.

Experts Are Puzzled

Short Stories & Anthologies

Ugly Duckling Presse

Poetry. Long out of print, THE CLOSE CHAPLET is Laura Riding's first book, 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. According to her biographer, Elizabeth Friedman, "many of the poems for THE CLOSE CHAPLET were brought in typescript from New York, a few were added in Egypt, and the entire text was carefully edited by Robert [Graves]." In his introduction, Mark Jacobs writes that Riding was "identifying herself with the pre-moment, the 'what-was-there' before Creation. How did the world, the universe, come to exist, why does it exist, why does it die, why do we?" From these questions, Riding 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 1926.

The Close Chaplet

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Books by Riding, Laura