Anarchism is Not Enough is a manifesto against systematic thinking, a difficult book by a famously difficult writer. For the scope of its critical imagination, it is the most radical work of Laura Riding's early period. This period extends from the end of 1925, when she left America for Europe and Robert Graves, to 1939, the year she returned to America, renounced any further writing of poetry, and soon after married Schuyler Jackson.

Published in 1928, when Riding was twenty-seven, Anarchism is a kind of early autobiographia literaria. Long out of print and now...

This new edition of "Contemporaries and Snobs," a landmark collection of essays by Laura Riding, offers a counter-history of high modernist poetics.
Laura Riding s "Contemporaries and Snobs" (1928) was the first volume of essays to engage critically with high modernist poetics from the position of the outsider. For readers today, it offers a compelling account by turns personal, by turns historical of how the institutionalization of modernism denuded experimental poetry. Most importantly, "Contemporaries and Snobs" offers a counter-history of the idiosyncratic, of what the institution of...