Lola Ridge | |
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| Born | Rose Emily Ridge (1873-12-12)12 December 1873 Dublin |
| Died | 19 May 1941(1941-05-19) (aged 67) |
| Nationality | New Zealander, American, Irish |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Literary movement | Greenwich Village |
| Notable awards | Guggenheim Fellowship, Shelley Memorial Award |
Lola Ridge (bornRose Emily Ridge; 12 December 1873 – 19 May 1941) was an Irish-born New Zealand-Americananarchist andmodernist poet, and an influential editor ofavant-garde,feminist, andMarxist publications. She is best known for her long poems and poetic sequences, published in numerous magazines and collected in five books of poetry.[1]
Along with other political poets of the early Modernist period, Ridge has received renewed critical attention since the late 20th century and has been lauded by contemporary poets for her choice and ability to write about urban spaces in her poems.[2] A selection of her poetry was published in 2007, and a biography,Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet (byTerese Svoboda) was published in 2016.[3][4]
Rose Emily Ridge was born in 1873 inDublin, Ireland, to Emma Ridge (née Reilly) and Joseph Henry. She was her parents' only surviving child. John Henry died when Ridge was three-years-old, and Ridge and her mother subsequently emigrated toHokitika, New Zealand, when she was six-years-old.[4] In 1895, she married Peter Webster, the manager of a Hokitika gold mine. In 1903 she left Webster and moved to Sydney, Australia with their three-year-old son Keith to attend Trinity College and study painting at theSydney Art School withJulian Ashton.[5][6]
After her mother died, Ridge emigrated to the United States in 1907 and reinvented herself as Lola Ridge, a poet and painter. She settled in San Francisco and published inOverland Monthly.[6] Ridge placed her son in a Californian orphanage[4] and moved to New York City'sGreenwich Village.[6] Working as a model for artists, in a factory and as a poet and illustrator, she became involved in working class politics and protests, and worked withEmma Goldman andMargaret Sanger.[6] Her first book of poetry was published in 1918. On 22 October 1919, Ridge married David Lawson, a fellow radical.[6]
Ridge sent a collection of her poems entitledVerses (1905) inspired by her childhood in Hokitika toA.G. Stephens at theSydney Bulletin, but he declined to publish the collection.[4][6] In 1918, Ridge gained considerable notice with her long poem,The Ghetto, first published inThe New Republic. It was included in her first book,The Ghetto and Other Poems, published that year. The title poem portrays theJewish immigrant community ofHester Street in theLower East Side of New York, where Ridge lived for a time.[6] It explores the effects of capitalism, gender, and generational conflict in ways that bear comparison to the works ofCharles Reznikoff. In addition, Ridge gave an empathetic portrayal of America's urban masses and immigrant communities.[4] The book was a critical success.
This recognition led to opportunities for Ridge; she became involved with and edited newavant-garde magazines such asOthers in 1919, andBroom, founded in 1921 byHarold Loeb, for which she was the American editor from 1922 to 1923, while he published in Rome. While working with Loeb, she had an apartment next to the basement office ofBroom in the townhouse of his estranged wifeMarjorie Content.[6] As part of her work atOthers, Ridge gave a lecture tour in 1919 on "Women and the Creative Will," arguing that traditional gender roles were a form of patriarchal control used to suppress female creativity.[6][4]
Ridge published 61 poems from 1908 to 1937 in such leading magazines asPoetry,New Republic,The Saturday Review of Literature andMother Earth.[1] She was a contributing editor toThe New Masses.[6]
She wrote and published four more books of poetry through 1935, and single poems into 1937. Her collections includeThe Ghetto, and Other Poems (1918),Sun-up, and Other Poems (1920),Red Flag (1927),Firehead (1930), andDance of Fire (1935).[6] Her work was also collected in anthologies. Her third book,Red Flag (1927) collected much of her political poetry.[1]
In 1929, Ridge was accepted for a residency at the writers colony ofYaddo. That year she publishedFirehead, a long poem that was a radical retelling of Jesus' crucifixion. It and her last book, published in 1935 were more philosophical compared to her earlier work.[1]
She was awarded aGuggenheim Fellowship in 1935. She received theShelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1934 and 1935. Publishing until 1937, she died in 1941 of pulmonarytuberculosis.[6]
Ridge did not join any political party, but was active in radical causes. She protested against the executions ofSacco and Vanzetti in 1927, and was among those arrested that day. In the 1930s, she supported the defence ofTom Mooney andWarren Billings, who had been framed for a 1916 bombing at thePreparedness Day Parade in San Francisco.
Her actions during the demonstration in front of the prison on the day Sacco and Vanzetti were executed were described byKatherine Anne Porter in her long essay, "The Never Ending Wrong." She wrote, "One tall, thin figure of a woman stepped out alone, a good distance into the empty square, and when the police came down at her and the horse's hoofs beat over her head, she did not move, but stood with her shoulders slightly bowed, entirely still. The charge was repeated again and again, but she was not to be driven away. A man near me said in horror, suddenly recognizing her, 'That's Lola Ridge!' and dashed into the empty space toward her. Without any words or a moment's pause, he simply seized her by the shoulders and walked her in front of him back to the edge of the crowd, where she stood as if she were half-conscious. I came near her and said, 'Oh no, don't let them hurt you! They've done enough damage already.' And she said, 'This is the beginning of the end – we have lost something we shan't find again.' I remember her bitter hot breath and her deathlike face."
Peter Quartermain described her in theDictionary of Literary Biography as "the nearest prototype in her time of theproletarian poet of class conflict, voicing social protest or revolutionary idealism."[6]
With renewed scholarly interest in Ridge's work since the late 20th century, selections from her first three books of poetry were published posthumously as,Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems (2007), edited and with an introduction by Daniel Tobin. Tobin notes that Ridge was, "part of the confluence of politics, culture and the burgeoning of women's voices at the advent of modernism to the start of World War II."[8] Furthermore, Tobin highlights the importance of Ridge's depiction of urban settings in contrast to other modernist writers likeEzra Pound orT.S. Eliot. For Ridge, the modern city becomes a "community shaped by ritual and mutual need rather than an exposé of modern angst and alienation and dissipation."[4]
Robert Pinsky, formerPoet Laureate of the United States, wrote that contemporary readers need, "to appreciate the magnitude and freshness of her enterprise: to make poetry out of the actual city."[2] Pinsky likens Ridge to 18th-century British poetWilliam Blake in her ability to express the perspective of children, evoking, "innocence and experience in a way that blurs the ambiguous boundary between them."[2] Pinsky also notes that Ridge preceded AmericanHart Crane, known for his long poemThe Bridge about theBrooklyn Bridge, in her assigning "ecstatic, high language of the past, especially of the Elizabethans, to the squalid and the sublime realities of the actual, 20th-century American city."[2]
Media related toLola Ridge at Wikimedia Commons
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