Laura Riding is known primarily as a modernist poet, with her reputation being established in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Her work with Robert Graves on modernism, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), was a significant statement on the theory of modernist poetry, influenced such critics as William Empson, and raised important questions for postmodernism. Other important theoretical statements were Anarchism Is Not Enough and Contemporaries and Snobs, both published in 1928.

In the 1930’s, Riding turned increasingly to fiction writing, producing A Trojan Ending (1937, 1984). After she renounced poetry in 1939, she wrote little, but worked on a mammoth project with Schuyler Jackson on the nature of meaning and language. This was published posthumously in 1997 as Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words, and Supplementary Essays (edited by William Harmon) and was followed by The Failure of Poetry, the Promise of Language in 2007 (edited by John Nolan).

In her own lifetime, Laura Riding established herself as a modernist poet within literary circles, although she entered into an uneasy alliance with modernism and, increasingly, an uneasy alliance with poetry itself. She was as well known for her association with Robert Graves and for her eccentric lifestyle. After 1939, she disappeared from public view. In the 1970’s, critics and scholars began to reexamine her writing, both prose and poetry, and she began to be regarded more highly as a writer. Her only public awards were a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1979, both for her to continue her theoretical studies on the meaning of words, and the Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1991.