Anarchism is Not Enough is a manifesto against systematic thinking, a difficult book by a famously difficult writer. For the scope of its critical imagination, it is the most radical work of Laura Riding's early period. This period extends from the end of 1925, when she left America for Europe and Robert Graves, to 1939, the year she returned to America, renounced any further writing of poetry, and soon after married Schuyler Jackson. Published in 1928, when Riding was twenty-seven, Anarchism is a kind of early autobiographia literaria. Long out of print and now available for the first time in paperback, this is one of the most imaginative and daring works of literary theory ever written by a modernist figure. Lisa Samuels's edition sets the work in its historical context and elucidates its central intellectual difficulties. Her introduction and notes are a valuable aid to an understanding of Riding's work.

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation. In "The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language,""" Laura (Riding) Jackson examines the subjects of poetry, language, and truth; the conflict between truth and art; and the range of human attitudes to the prospect of truth-speaking. Also included are a series of comments on and judgments of the poets Coleridge, Clare, Eliot, Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Lowell, Pound, Dylan Thomas, and W. C. Williams and selections from her correspondence ranging from 1948 to 1984. Laura (Riding) Jackson's first published poems appeared in 1923 in magazines such as "The Fugitive," In 1925 she moved to England, and during thirteen years abroad wrote some twenty books of poetry, criticism, and fiction. In 1941 she renounced poetry, married Schuyler B. Jackson, and collaborated with him on what would become "Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words," "The Telling," her spiritual testament, was published in 1972. In 1991 she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for her lifetime contribution to poetry. She died on September 2, 1991. John Nolan is a member of the Laura (Riding) Jackson Board of Literary Management, and co-editor, with Alan J. Clark, of Laura (Riding) Jackson's "Under the Mind's Watch" (2004). He lives in London, England.

This new edition of "Contemporaries and Snobs," a landmark collection of essays by Laura Riding, offers a counter-history of high modernist poetics.
Laura Riding's "Contemporaries and Snobs" (1928) was the first volume of essays to engage critically with high modernist poetics from the position of the outsider. For readers today, it offers a compelling account--by turns personal, by turns historical--of how the institutionalization of modernism denuded experimental poetry. Most importantly, "Contemporaries and Snobs" offers a counter-history of the idiosyncratic, of what the institution of modernism left (and leaves) behind. With Gertrude Stein as its figurehead, the book champions the noncanonical, the "barbaric," and the undertheorized.
Riding's nuanced defense of a poetics of the person in "Contemporaries and Snobs" represents a forgotten but essential first attempt to identify and foster what is now a well-defined poetic lineage that leads from Stein to the contemporary experimental avant-garde. In these essays, Riding takes her readers on a remarkably thorough tour through the critical scene of the 1920s. Among other influential treatises, she considers T. S. Eliot's "The Sacred Wood" and his editorial essays in "The Criterion," Allen Tate's "Poetry and the Absolute," John Crowe Ransom's essays on the modernist poet, Edgell Rickword's essays in "The Calendar of Modern Letters," and Herbert Read's posthumous publication of T. E. Hulme's essays. All of this criticism, Riding notes, gave modern poets a sheen of seriousness and professionalism, but was it good for poetry? Her decisive answer is "no." This new edition includes an introduction by Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm that makes legible the many connections between "Contemporaries and Snobs" and the critical debates and poetic experiments of the 1920s, as well as explanatory notes, a chronological bibliography of Riding's work, and an index of proper names.