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, individual act of creativity. 

In eight incisive essays, Riding takes readers on a tour of the literary scene of her day, exposing how the institutionalization of modernism threatened to clog the wellsprings of poetic originality. With ferocious wit, she critiques the philosophical dogmas of T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, and the critical machinery of The Criterion, while elevating Gertrude Stein as the figurehead of a radical alternative, a “barbaric” poetics rooted in linguistic freshness. Riding’s defense of the poet as person, her skepticism toward impersonality, and her insistence on poetry’s autonomy from systems of thought anticipate later feminist and avant-garde critiques, making this volume a cornerstone for rethinking modernist traditions. In an era when debates about authenticity, individuality, and the institutional pressures on art feel more urgent than ever, Contemporaries and Snobs offers a counter-history, a reminder that poetry thrives not in conformity but in idiosyncrasy. Riding’s voice, imperious yet visionary, speaks directly to contemporary concerns about creative freedom and the commodification of literature. 

Nearing the centenary of its first publication, Contemporaries and Snobs will interest scholars of modernism and literary criticism, readers of Gertrude Stein and experimental poetics, feminist critics and theorists of authorship, and readers fascinated by the intellectual battles that shaped twentieth-century poetry.

Laura Riding, later Laura (Riding) Jackson, was a prolific and respected poet, and writer of both fiction and nonfiction, who published all her major poetry during the 1920s and 1930s. During those two decades Riding published thirteen collections of poetry along with six novels and story collections and eight works of nonfiction, including Contemporaries and Snobs. Riding later turned her attention solely to nonfiction, actively publishing until her death in 1991. She was honored with the Mark Rothko Appreciation Award in 1971, a Guggenheim fellowship in 1973, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1979, and Yale University’s Bollingen Prize for her lifetime contribution to poetry in 1991.

Jane Malcolm is an assistant professor of English at the Université de Montréal. She has written previously about Laura Riding’s gendered poetics and about the ambivalent feminisms of H.D., Mina Loy, and Gertrude Stein.

Laura Heffernan is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Florida. She has written previously about the modernist criticism of Rebecca West, John Rodker, T. E. Hulme, and Edmund Wilson.