Laura Riding (born Laura Reichenthal) was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist, and short story writer who emerged as a prominent figure in the modernist literary scene of the 20th century. Born in New York City, she studied at Cornell University and became associated with the Fugitives, a group of Southern poets, before moving to Europe in 1926. There, she began a long-standing personal and professional partnership with the British writer Robert Graves, with whom she co-founded the Seizin Press and co-authored several influential critical works.\n\nRiding's poetry is characterized by its intellectual complexity, linguistic precision, and rejection of traditional poetic ornamentation. She sought a pure form of truth through language, a quest that eventually led her to renounce poetry altogether in the late 1930s, arguing that it inherently distorted truth. Her critical work, particularly A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), written with Graves, is credited with helping to shape the New Criticism movement by pioneering close-reading techniques.\n\nIn her later years, after returning to the United States and marrying Schuyler B. Jackson, she focused on lexicographical and linguistic studies, working for decades on a massive project exploring the meanings of words. Throughout her life, Riding remained an uncompromising and fiercely independent voice in modern literature, demanding absolute integrity from both writers and the language they used.
