SOURCE: Perloff, Marjorie. “The Witch of Truth.” Parnassus 23, nos. 1-2 (spring 1998): 334-53.

In the following unfavorable assessment of A Selection of the Poems of Laura Riding, Perloff provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of Riding's poetry.

Rejoice, the witch of truth has perished Of her own will— Falling to earth humanly And rising in petty pain. 

It was the last grandeur, When the witch crashed And had a mortal laming. … 

The occasion of “Rejoice, Liars,” from which these lines are taken, was Laura Riding's fabled suicide leap (27 April 1929) from the fourth-story bedroom window of the Hammersmith flat she shared with her long-time lover Robert Graves. He followed her lead by jumping from another window, one story below. Riding, as her biographer Deborah Baker tells it,¹ was in despair at having been rejected by a more recent lover, a neurotic Irish journalist-aesthete named Geoffrey Phibbs. Before taking the near-fatal...