Life & Wisdom Quote by Laura Riding

Riding yanks "art" off its velvet pedestal and drags it into the street where people actually live. By calling art a "term" that refers to a "social source" and "social utility", she’s not defining beauty; she’s policing language. The maneuver is strategic: if art is primarily a label we apply to creative acts, then the label can be interrogated, revoked, or exposed as ideological cover. Riding, a poet famously skeptical of literary institutions and the romance of the artist-genius, tightens the screws on the idea that creation is private, mystical, or self-justifying.

The phrasing is pointedly clinical. "Social source" undercuts the fantasy of the solitary creator, reminding us that every lyric impulse is built from shared materials: idiom, genre, education, class expectations, even the permissions a culture grants certain voices. "Social utility" is sharper. It implies that art is not merely enjoyed but used: to confer status, to enforce taste hierarchies, to launder power into "culture", to serve as a moral alibi, to produce community, to soothe, to provoke. Riding doesn’t specify which utilities are legitimate; she makes the reader do the uncomfortable work of naming them.

Context matters: a modernist era obsessed with formal innovation and aesthetic autonomy, plus Riding’s own turn toward truth-telling and suspicion of poetic glamour. The subtext is a warning: if you insist art is above society, you’re likely protecting some social arrangement you’d rather not admit.