[In the following excerpt, Kinzie provides a mixed assessment of The Poems of Laura Riding.]

Laura Riding is represented in the Norton because the poems she wrote in the 1920s were admired by the Fugitives, and because her collaboration with Robert Graves on A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) initiated or encouraged innovations in literary interpretation. Empson, Ransom, and Brooks were all indebted to the Riding-Graves critique; and although her poetry has not found many imitators, at least one poet sympathetic to some of Riding's early techniques of flattening texture with abstractions, joining hard consonant sounds together, effortlessly coining neologisms, and using plain words in delicately twisted syntax, has had an almost incalculable influence on modern poetry. Now whether W. H. Auden stole from Laura Riding or not, it is clear that what in Riding remained an inward and self-revolving technique becomes in Auden a rhetorical method for satirizing the modern temper. Riding was interested in making strange the words for her own story, Auden in judging shared behavior.

With respect to their comrades in art, writers generally fall into two groups, those who praise writers most like themselves (the enclave tendency) and those who are drawn to writers who are least like themselves (the need to protect an enclave of one). Laura Riding belonged to the second group to the extent that she found threatening the experiments with a small vocabulary, incantation, and narrow wordplay of Gertrude Stein—experiments that resembled her own. Both Stein and Riding were repelled by pretty adjectives, Swinburnian settings, and obvious tropes (especially simile), although this fact does not distinguish them from scores of poets at the turn of the century who were fed up with Victorian embellishment. But there was a particularly rabid American wave of modernism in the 1920s that broke with what Hardy called the jewelled Tennysonian line more radically than did Hardy, Edward Thomas, or even Pound. On this wave were cast up e. e. cummings, Riding, and Gertrude Stein, whom Laura Riding called a “barbarian,” a writer who worked toward “mass-originality … without her ordinariness being destroyed.” But in fact, says Riding, Stein is “completely without originality. … She uses language automatically to record pure, ultimate obviousness” (Contemporaries and Snobs, 1928).

Riding did not go as far as Stein did in humming her language to death, but she was prone to effects only slightly less narcotic:

The little quids, the monstrous quids,
The everywhere, everything, always quids,
The atoms of the Monoton,
Each turned an essence where it stood,
Ground a gisty dust from its neighbours' edges,
Until a powdery thoughtfall stormed in and out—
The cerebration of a slippery quid enterprise.

(“The Quids”)

‘Poor John, John, John, John, John,’
Said the parson as he perched
On the sharp left discomfort
Of John John's tombstone—
John, John, John, John, John.

(“Lying Spying”)

His luck was perhaps no luck.
I am a fine fellow.
My good luck is perhaps no luck.
All luck is perhaps no luck.
All luck is luck or perhaps no luck.

(“The Lullaby”)

What to say when I
When I or the spider
No I and I what
Does what does dies
No when the spider dies
Death spider death
Death always I
Death before always

(“Elegy in a Spider's Web”)

These excerpts indicate a problem that persists in better poems. Like Emily Dickinson and (to a degree) Christina Rossetti, Riding is essentially a writer of the small mot, the epigram, the poem of a few lines. Here is a fine example of what Riding can do when she keeps her circuit small:

This posture and this manner suit
Not that I have an ease in them
But that I have a horror
And so stand well upright—
Lest, should I sit and, flesh-conversing, eat,
I choke upon a piece of my own tongue-meat.

(“Grace”)

Yet The Poems of Laura Riding is composed of poems that average between twenty and thirty-five lines. Since her thought has a short round, most of her poems have to start over again halfway through, giving them that hint of casuistry, of bombast and self-importance, that are inevitable when somebody continues to hold the floor after they have finished talking. Riding lacked that regard for stylistic integrity that even the most eccentric modernist poets like Marianne Moore and e. e. cummings and Pound applied so skillfully in the breaking of it. To break a mold, to raise the pitch of an argument, something must be there to be broken, or broken from.

This background of continuity is what Riding's poems miss. For example, the first stanza of the following poem does all that an epigrammatic poem should do, namely, it charms, it points, it suggests. The second stanza blunders through that established delicacy and reiterates more harshly the same point that was better made in the first stanza; the only new idea added in the second is that of following at a slower rate. While the third stanza, whatever its charm, is of a rhetoric more antique, self-conscious, and childish (“No harm is meant,” “the thighs / Are meek”):

Without dressmakers to connect
The good-will of the body
With the purpose of the head,
We should be two worlds
Instead of a world and its shadow
The flesh.
The head is one world
And the body another—
The same, but somewhat slower
And more dazed and earlier,
The divergence being corrected
In dress.
There is an odour of Christ
In the cloth: below the chin
No harm is meant. Even, immune
From capital test, wisdom flowers
Out of the shaded breast, and the thighs
Are meek.

(“Because of Clothes”)

This poem has three more stanzas, each neutral to the others by virtue of similar disjunctions in sense and tone.

Riding and Graves make an interesting observation in their Survey of Modernist Poetry that could be adjusted for the poetry of Laura Riding. After getting rid of form imposed from without, modern poets sought “some principle of … government from within.” This was (in circular fashion) free verse. Formal metrical poetry had an external government that could endlessly lap the miles of any thematic materials, hence the natural extension of formal poetry to the long poem (the Aeneid, In Memoriam), which had no need to work at its transitions. A poem like The Waste Land, on the other hand, since it refrained from inducing the anticipation of regularly recurring verse patterns, had to forge each transition by hand, moving from theme to theme, mood to mood, on the back of deeply pondered associations and echoes. Therefore, Riding and Graves argue, The Waste Land is really just a 433-line short poem. I think this idea can also work in reverse for the poem that has no transitions. Riding's “Because of Clothes” is really a thirty-six-line Sartor Resartus, that is, a long work trapped in the wrong short form. Riding uses in poetry material that is never made poetic, and yet the poems are not energetic enough to extend themselves out to their proper length. Her rejection of poetry in 1938, motivated in part by the deterioration of the Graves ménage, may also have been grounded in this fact, that her impulse was not to write poems at all, but the prose discourses and meditations on body, mind, language, and union, which she has indeed written for the past forty years.

Riding has also during this period become her own advocate in quasi-mystical apologias about her place in literature and her meaning for the history of words. The career of this writer has a psychological dimension that is hard to put delicately: she was an arrogant and impatient poet, in many ways juvenile in the estimation of her importance, in her endless poetic divagations about the right kind of pain, the right kind of strangeness, and the right kind of language, and in her repeated challenges to the reader and the lover that they work hard to discover the exact nuance of her meaning:

Come, words, away:
I am a conscience of you
Not to be held unanswered past
The perfect number of betrayal.
It is a smarting passion
By which I call—
Wherein the calling's loathsome as
Memory of man-flesh over-fondled
With words like over-gentle hands.

The smarting passion of Laura Riding has not made much difference to the world of letters, and we cannot help but regret the dead wood in this massive and second-rate oeuvre, from which so often the small gems of precision blink:

I moved the soldier-lusts in you:
Thus did you honour me.

(“After Smiling”)

Fresh year of time, desire,
Late year of my age, renunciation—
Ill-mated pair, debating if the window
Is worth leaping out of, and by whom.

(“In Nineteen Twenty-Seven”)

What is to cry out?
It is to make gigantic
Where speaking cannot last long.

(“As Many Questions As Answers”)