The Unthronged Oracle

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 dem...