Life & Wisdom Quote by Laura Riding

Riding is throwing a gauntlet at the reader who wants poetry to behave like a tasteful narcotic: take it in, feel better, store a warm afterglow. Her insistence that poetry’s purpose is not “a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind” targets the common bargain we strike with art - that it should soothe, elevate, or at least reward attention with a clean, consumable feeling. Riding refuses the transaction. Poetry, for her, isn’t self-care; it’s pressure.

The key move is the pivot from “after-effect” to “immediate, constant” presence. She frames the poem not as a souvenir but as an event that keeps happening, a demand that doesn’t fade politely once you close the book. “Unpleasant insistence” is doing double duty: it rejects aesthetic comfort, and it hints at ethics. If poetry is truthful - and Riding’s modernist-era project is intensely invested in truth-telling - then it may need to disturb the reader’s habits of perception, even their self-image. Pleasure becomes suspect because it can be a form of closure, a sign that you’ve domesticated the poem into “meaning” you can own.

Context matters: Riding wrote against the grain of early 20th-century literary culture that often treated poetry either as rarefied beauty or as clever technique. Her line reads like a refusal of both: no ornamental prettiness, no neat intellectual trick. The poem’s value is its stubborn present tense, its ability to stay unresolved inside you, like an argument you can’t win but can’t stop having.