SOURCE: Adams, Barbara. “Laura Riding's Poems: A Double Ripeness.” Modern Poetry Studies 11, nos. 1-2 (1982): 189-95.

In the following essay, Adams delineates the defining characteristics of Riding's Selected Poems.

I labored, as a poet, to bring the poetic endeavor out from the climate of the mere different in wording into an air of utterance in which the ring and spirit and mental movement of true wording and that of familiar wording coincided into a non-differentiability, a quality of human and linguistic universalness. I think that Collected Poems reveals also how my commitment to poetry and my commitment to a universal linguistic solution befitting the general dignity of being human went as far as they could go together.

(Preface, p. 8, The Poems of Laura Riding)

In 1940, at the height of her poetic career, Laura Riding renounced poetry, just two years after the publication of one-hundred eight-one of her poems in...