SOURCE: Rosenthal, M. L. “Laura Riding's Poetry: A Nice Problem.” Southern Review 21, no. 1 (winter 1985): 89-95.

In the following essay, Rosenthal offers a mixed review of Riding's poetry, contending that “her writing is full of promises but preserved, as it were, in ambiguities, ironies, and near-solipsistic musings.”

Our usual expectations for lyric poetry that succeeds include a tonal dynamics leading to something realized, or an equilibrium among states of feeling. And yet just the opposite, a resistance to culmination or structural completion that is also a resistance to commitment or self-identification, can make for a genuine lyric poem as well. Laura Riding's poems, the work of her latter twenties and earliest thirties, are often of this order, foreshadowing certain current American developments.

Her writing is full of promises but preserved, as it were, in ambiguities, ironies, and near-solipsistic musings. Endlessly elusive, she gives of herself richly only on the...