Laura (Riding) Jackson died in 1991 at the age of ninety. The Poems of Laura Riding were published in 1938, after which she renounced poetry, an act which still challenges her readers. That volume omitted some two hundred early pieces, all written before she left America for England in 1926. She left those published and unpublished poems with a friend in New York; they were rediscovered in 1979. She consented to their publication.

Her friend the editor Elizabeth Friedmann writes of how the poems 'experiment in what poetry can do. They are stepping-stones on the path that led her ultimately to a realization of what poetry cannot do.' The impact of Laura (Riding) Jackson's work on writers from Graves and Empson to Auden and Ashbery is acknowledged: she is one of the defining intelligences of the century.