SOURCE: Fitzgerald, Robert. Review of The Collected Poems of Laura Riding. Kenyon Review 1, (winter 1939): 341-45.

In the following review, Fitzgerald praises Riding's The Collected Poems of Laura Riding for its use of language.

Of all the contemporary poems I know, these seem to me the furthest advanced, the most personal and the purest. I hope, but hardly believe, that they will be assimilated soon into the general consciousness of literature.

The authority, the dignity of truth telling, lost by poetry to science, may gradually be regained. If it is, these poems should one day be a kind of Principia. They argue that the art of language is the most fitting instrument with which to press upon full reality and make it known.

There are several modes of literary revelation. A fine novel makes us aware of fine quotidian truths; an exact work of reason informs us of fine...