In the late 1920s Laura Riding's poems and essays catapulted her to the front line of modernism. Like other poets beginning their careers after World War I, Riding distrusted the rhetoric and rules of traditional literature and refused to follow discredited models in her writing. Fighting for new aesthetic standards, she saw poetry as the repository of truth. Turning inward to discover both her subject and an appropriate form, she was confident that introspection would reveal a universal essence. She found a voice within herself that reached back to Percy Bysshe Shelley and anticipated the postmodernists' verbal self-consciousness.

Early in her career, she wrote Donald Davidson that she found solace for her loneliness and sense of homelessness in her writing. Providing a way to unify and intensify experience, her poetry writing was less a retreat to a private world than a way of creating an alternative world, not...