SOURCE: Kinzie, Mary. Review of The Poems of Laura Riding. American Poetry Review 10, no. 6 (November 1981): 38-40.

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...