Contemporaries and Snobs

A new edition of Laura Riding's landmark 1928 poetry manifesto

Laura Riding’s Contemporaries and Snobs is one of modernism’s most audacious and overlooked manifestos, a book that drew a sharp line through the literary world of the late 1920s that is still visible today. In it, Riding dismantles the pretensions of the “snobs”—critics and poet-professionals who sought to codify modern poetry into systems—and champions the “contemporaries,” those who practiced poetry as an eccentric, individu...