Art & Creativity Quote by Laura Riding

Riding is puncturing the romantic fantasy that poetry is a truth machine. She names a seduction poets know well: the feeling that if a poem lands with internal inevitability - the right image, the right turn of phrase - it has somehow answered the biggest questions. That glow of completion can masquerade as philosophical closure. Riding calls it what it is: an aesthetic satisfaction mistaken for epistemic victory.

The sentence is built like a trapdoor. It begins by granting the poet's experience ("can seem to solve the problem of truth") and then drops the harder claim: poetry solves only "a problem of art". The repetition of "problem" matters. Truth is framed as a problem not because it's merely difficult, but because it's structurally different from an artistic problem. Art problems are bounded: how to make a form hold, how to arrange a voice, how to make meaning felt. Truth problems sprawl into ethics, history, and consequence - arenas where beauty can't certify accuracy.

Contextually, Riding wrote against the early-20th-century cult of the autonomous artwork and the modernist tendency to treat the poem as a self-sufficient world. Her skepticism also reads as self-critique: she was famously severe about language, suspicious of poetic "effects" that manufacture conviction. The subtext is almost moral: poets have power, and the danger isn't lying, it's believing your own finish line. A poem can clarify, sharpen, even embarrass our evasions. But Riding insists it can't launder uncertainty into truth just because the cadence is persuasive.