Always ahead of her time, no other major poet of the last century enters the twenty-first so fresh, so essentially unexplored as does Laura Riding. Her formidable credentials as a modernist need no longer distract attention from the class-of-her-own this writer occupies. Beginning in spiritual respect for Shelley, Whitman, and Francis Thompson, Riding's resolve to work toward nothing less than "the essence of the good in language" carries her across an entire poetic world within this volume -- as it afterwards carried her out of poetry altogether.
This centennial volume presents the entire content of the 1980 edition, together with the author's retrospective Introduction and Appendices, corrected and reset. The poem-text reproduces, with the few errata corrected, the typography and design of the celebrated first edition of 1938, as supervised by the author herself. Included are the ten memorable full-page illustrations by John Aldridge.
