SOURCE: Adams, Barbara. “Laura Riding's Autobiographical Poetry: ‘My Muse Is I’.” Concerning Poetry 15, no. 2 (fall 1982): 71-87.

In the following essay, Adams addresses Riding's search for perfection in her poetry and life, and compares her verse to that of Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell.

Laura Riding directed her main energies as a poet towards the creation of an ideal self in an ideal language. She worked hard to find a means of stabilizing the self in an uncompromising real world, producing in the process a major body of poetry, criticism, fiction and letters in fifteen busy years—1923 to 1938. All in all, by 1938 she had published nine volumes of poetry, four books of criticism (two in collaboration with Robert Graves), two novels, two collections of short stories and dozens of essays. Moreover, with Robert Graves she founded and operated the Seizin Press which published handsome limited editions of poems and...