Beyond Poetry

Laura Riding (1901-1990)—born Laura Reichenthal to Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York—is perhaps the least familiar to us of the great American modernist poets who revolutionized our literature in the first half of the 20th century. Famous in her own day, in the company of Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and W.H. Auden, Riding renounced poetry in her early 40s to devote herself, in the obscurity of rural Florida, to citrus farming and the philosophy of language.