First awakenings

When Laura Riding sailed for England in December, 1925, she left many of her personal belongings in the safekeeping of a friend in Greenwich Village. Among these items was a box containing the typescripts of more than two hundred poems, a few of which had been published in magazines such as The Fugitive, Poetry Nomad, Lyric West, and Contemporary Verse. Then aged twenty-four, Laura Riding had already been hailed as a leading voice of her generation. She had come to New York to pursue a life devoted to poetry, but saw her American contemporaries as lacking a seriousness, both poetic and personal, which she considered to be the poet's essential attribute. So when an invitation came from Robert Graves and Nancy Nicholson in England, she accepted. In Europe she found "solitariness in which to probe the reality of poetry as a spiritual, not merely literary, inheritance." Although by 1938 she could say that "to live in, by, for the reasons of, poems is to habituate oneself to the good existence," her probing finally led her to renounce poetry; she had found poetic utterance inherently incapable of yielding the full truth-potential of words. Meanwhile the correspondence with the friend in