Laura Riding was a major poet whose poems, though widely admired and influential, have been little understood. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s she was 'a devout advocate of poetry' believing that 'to go to poetry is the most ambitious act of the mind'. Her subsequent renunciation of poetry in the 1940s gave rise to bemusement. Jack Blackmore tackles the causes of the neglect of Riding's poetry and establishes new and productive approaches to the poems. His close readings of fifteen poems demonstrate the progress of Collected Poems and the remarkable range and scope of her poetry. He establishes both the strength and unity of the poems and the continuity between them and her 'post-poetic' work, in particular her spiritual testament The Telling. Mark Jacobs's vivid memoir of a visit to the author in later life at her Florida home complements the work on the poems. "These essays are interesting and you have done well...You seem to me fair and just in what you say about her work.' - Robert Nye 'This is ambitious work, full of insights.' - Professor Michael Schmidtÿ

Combining both a historical and a critical approach toward the works of major British, American, French, German and Russian poets, this work surveys a century of high poetic achievement

Modernism: An Anthology is the most comprehensive anthology of Anglo-American modernism ever to be published. Amply represents the giants of modernism - James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Samuel Beckett. Includes a generous selection of Continental texts, enabling readers to trace modernism’s dialogue with the Futurists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and the Frankfurt School. Supported by helpful annotations, and an extensive bibliography. Allows readers to encounter anew the extraordinary revolution in language that transformed the aesthetics of the modern world .

Primarily a literary history, Women, Modernism and British Poetry, 1910-1939 provides a timely discussion of individual women poets who have become, or are becoming, well-known as their works are reprinted but about whom little has yet been written. This volume recognizes the contributions, overlooked previously, of such British poets as Anna Wickham, Nancy Cunard, Edith Sitwell, Mina Loy, Charlotte Mew, May Sinclair, Vita Sackville-West and Sylvia Townsend Warner; and the impact of such American poets as H.D., Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore and Laura Riding on literary practice in Britain. This book primarily maps the poetry scene in Britain but identifies the significance of the network of writers between London, New York and Paris. It assesses women's participation in the diversity of modernist developments which include avant-garde experiments, quiet, but subtly challenging, formalism and assertive 'new woman' voices. It not only chronicles women's poetry but also their publications and involvement in running presses, bookshops and writing criticism. Although historically situated, it is written from the perspective of contemporary debates concerning the interface of gender and modernism. The author argues that a cohering aesthetic of the poetry is a denial of femininity through various evasions of gendered identity such as masking, male and female impersonations and the rupturing of realist modes.

Amid competing claims about who first developed the theories and practices that became known as New Criticism - the critical method that rose alongside Modernism - literary historians have generally given the lion's share of credit to William Empson and I.A. Richards. In The Birth of New Criticism Donald Childs challenges this consensus and provides a new and authoritative narrative of the movement's origins. At the centre stand Robert Graves and Laura Riding, two poet-critics who have been written out of the history of New Criticism. Childs brings to light the long-forgotten early criticism of Graves to detail the ways in which his interpretive methods and ideas evolved into the practice of "close reading," demonstrating that Graves played such a fundamental part in forming both Empson's and Richards's critical thinking that the story of twentieth-century literary criticism must be re-evaluated and re-told. Childs also examines the important influence that Riding's work had on Graves, Empson, and Richards, establishing the importance of this long-neglected thinker and critic. A provocative and cogently argued work, The Birth of New Criticism is both an important intellectual history of the movement and a sharply observed account of the cultural politics of its beginnings and legacy.

Gathers essays about modernism, Marxist criticism art patronage, Wallace Stevens, Picasso, Aaron Copland, Michel Foucault, Barbara Pym, Richard Serra, and Cindy Sherman.

The book offers new methodological and interpretive avenues for reconceptualising modernism's longstanding relationship to close reading.

A theoretical, historical, and critical inquiry, this book looks at the assumptions anthologies are predicated on, how they are put together, the treatment of the poems in them, and the effects their presentations have on their readers.