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“... After I had long nursed a faithIn the promise on which poetry has thrived –The recalled promise of languageAt its careful rising in mindsTo teach all, little by little,Until life and speech are one,Union of being with itself,Of knowledge with the known,Instantaneity consumingThe separating silence heard as ‘time’,The beat, beat, of not-yet, not-yet –Suddenly I saw, startling at each other,In me, without interchange,The plight of life and the plight of poetry,That I had lovingly judged near-same ...”

“... There are at least two words ‘poetry’, one meaning linguistic activity of a certain kind, the other meaning verbal matter produced by such activity. I speak in this little essay of what it is that poets are doing and what their activity amounts to in the scales of human behaviour, rather than of poetry the verbal matter – although I may be drawn into making incidental references to it ...”

“... Laura Riding, so Deborah Baker tells us, first emerged into the public world of books in 1924. She was 23 years old and living in Louisville with her husband, a history professor whom she met when he was her teacher at Cornell. One of the things that had attracted Lou Gottschalk to Laura Reichenthal, as Riding had then been called, was that she knew her Marx better than the other undergraduate ladies did ...”

“... his father’s diary that he thought would be useful, gave me his opinions about the influence of Laura Riding on Robert, and talked to me at length and frankly on the telephone. He behaved as a conscientious man should behave. What I got from him was mostly confirmatory of what I had got from Robert Graves himself (at a time when neither of us ...”

“... to be a tolerably complete one. The story is Graves’s long affair – 1926 to 1939 – with Laura Riding, and his eventual dismissal, or escape. No doubt it was both, yet it seems likely that if this extraordinary woman, a Circe in modern dress, had not set about enchanting a new Odysseus, a brilliant American called Schuyler Jackson, Graves might ...”

“... of Graves, while tacitly admitting that this claim cannot be made good until after Graves, and Laura (Riding) Jackson, are dead. Laura (Riding) Jackson is, of course, no mean obstacle to gaining a clear and unobstructed view of ...”

“... love of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, Robert Graves and Laura Riding, Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam, W.B. and Georgie Yeats all get chapters to themselves. Since some of her cases come close to the pathological, and most are ineffably silly, there is nothing instructive about reading or writing here: only the ...”

“... long periods of neglect: John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding and David Schubert. ‘I myself value Schubert more than Pound or Eliot,’ Ashbery says, and one can imagine some members of his audience gasping. In the introduction to his 1966 anthology, 19th-Century British Minor Poets, Auden provides four ...”

“... own Muse. Only a handful – such as Sappho, the seventh-century Irish poet Liadan, and of course Laura Riding – proved briefly capable of managing this double role, while Graves felt that no homosexual man could hope to be authentically inspired. As Randall Jarrell first pointed out in an excellent essay of 1955 (collected in The Third Book of ...”

“... a political allegory of his own disharmony.’ A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), written with Laura Riding, attacks the editorial urge to remove the crucial ambiguities of Sonnet 129 by tidying up the commas. ‘Shakespeare’s punctuation,’ they argue, ‘allows the variety of meanings he actually intends.’ The close reader’s task is to ...”

“... a colon, books that will settle for nothing less than improvement for their readers. Currently riding high are Why Your Life Sucks: And What You Can Do about It by Alan Cohen, When Children Grieve: For Adults to Help Children Deal with Death, Divorce, Pet Loss, Moving and Other Losses by John James and Russell Friedman, and Bodylove: Learning to Like Our ...”

“... and of Vita in particular, but his shotgun method reached many others, including Robert Graves and Laura Riding, J.C. Squire, and London literary politics in general. Some of the lines are funny, even witty, but more often the abuse is heavy, repetitious and sprawling: when Campbell was hating, he didn’t know when to stop. Still, the poem is as much a ...”

“... literary blade, Tate was known to have enjoyed some indiscretions (vide his ‘discovery’ of Laura Riding) but it was not until his later years – post-1940; he was born in 1899 – that he achieved Great Lover status. This randiness of Tate’s was not, O’Gorman has testified, ‘a phase, a period’, or even a mere ‘flash of libidinous ...”

“... though he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, was co-awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1991 (with Laura Riding – as odd a pairing as it’s possible to imagine) and was offered the US poet laureateship the year before his death. He seems not to have minded the poet’s poet label, or at least, when asked in an interview of 1996 whom he wrote ...”

“... EXTRACTS’ accounted for ‘nine-tenths of the reading of the reading public’. When, in 1928, Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s Pamphlet against Anthologies charged the genre with reducing poetry to a ‘packet-commodity’, the only alternative that they proposed revealed just how inescapable the anthology had become. The ‘full Corpus’ that ...”