Contemporaries and Snobs

This new edition of Contemporaries and Snobs , a landmark collection of essays by Laura Riding, offers a counter-history of high modernist poetics.   Laura Riding’s Contemporaries and Snobs (1928) was the first volume of essays to engage critically with high modernist poetics from the position of the outsider. For readers today, it offers a compelling account—by turns personal, by turns historical—of how the institutionalization of modernism denuded experimental poetry. Most importantly, Co