SOURCE: Carson, Luke. “‘This Is Something Unlosable’: Laura Riding's ‘Compacting Sense’.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 37, no. 4 (winter 1995): 414-44.

In the following essay, Carson explores the major thematic concerns of Riding's poetry, focusing on different forms of the contract—such as the covenant, guarantee, or promise.

Laura Riding was a poet-critic from the beginning of her career, writing pamphlets, essays, and books of criticism that took the modernism in which she herself played such an important role to task for failing to recognize its own most pathological symptoms. When she decisively abandoned poetry in the early 1940s, a period of silence followed. Upon her return to the public forum in the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, Riding was as insistent as ever that she be heard.¹ Her voice was no longer that of a poet-critic but that of a philosophical critic of modern culture and society...