Lola Ridge
| Lola Ridge | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | Rose Emily Ridge 12 December 1873 Dublin |
| Died | 19 May 1941 (aged 67) |
| Nationality | American |
| Ethnicity | Irish |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Literary movement | Greenwich Village |
| Notable awards | Guggenheim Fellowship, Shelley Memorial Award |
Lola Ridge, born Rose Emily Ridge (12 December 1873 Dublin – 19 May 1941 Brooklyn) was an Irish-American anarchist poet and an influential editor of avant-garde, feminist, and Marxist publications. She is best remembered for her long poems and poetic sequences, published in numerous magazines and collected in five books of poetry. Along with other political poets of the early Modernist period, Ridge has received renewed critical attention since the beginning of the 21st century and is praised for making poetry directly from harsh urban life. A new selection of her poetry was published in 2007 and a biography in 2016.
She was born Rose Emily Ridge in 1873 in Dublin, Ireland to Joseph Henry and Emma (Reilly) Ridge and was their only surviving child. When Rose was 13, her mother emigrated with her to New Zealand, where Emma later married a Scottish miner. Rose Ridge became politically active there. In 1895, while living in New Zealand, Rose Ridge married the manager of a gold mine. After they divorced, she moved to Sydney, attending Trinity College and also studying painting at Académie Julienne with Rossi Ashton.
Ridge emigrated to the United States after her mother died, settling first in San Francisco in 1907. There she identified as Lola Ridge, a poet and painter. She had her first poem published in the US in 1908 in Overland Monthly.
She later moved to New York, settling in Greenwich Village. After supporting herself writing ad copy, she left that to focus on her poetry. Working as a model and in a factory, she became involved in working class politics and protests. Peter Quartermain described her in the Dictionary of Literary Biography described her as "the nearest prototype in her time of the proletarian poet of class conflict, voicing social protest or revolutionary idealism."
Lola Ridge's first book of poetry was published in 1918. On 22 October 1919, she married David Lawson, a fellow radical.
After living for some time in New York, Ridge gained considerable notice with her long poem, The Ghetto, first published in 1918 in The New Republic. It was included in her first book, The Ghetto and Other Poems, published that year. The title poem portrays the Jewish immigrant community of Hester Street in the Lower East Side of New York. It explores the effects of capitalism, gender and generational conflict in ways that bear comparison to the works of Charles Reznikoff. But she also expressed the individuality of numerous immigrants, to show they were as various as other Americans and shared many human qualities. The book was a critical success.
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