"An ambition beyond poetry" in The Times Literary Supplement, 1973-02-09

"...However, once Keats had declared "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty", seeming to affirm an indissoluble unity, it was inevitable that sooner or later there would appear a poet who, having believed in Keat's assurance, would find that it didn't square with experience, and would be honest enough to say so. Laura Riding was that poet. She let it be known, in the years after her Collected Poems of 1938, that on these grounds she had abandoned poetry as inadequate to her ambitions and her hungers; and because she reached this decision in the midst of our present irreligious century, it seemed, to the few who cared, something unaccountable and bizzare."