Lola Ridge

Lola Ridge (born Rose Emily Ridge; 12 December 1873 – 19 May 1941) was an Irish-born New Zealand-American anarchist and modernist poet, and an influential editor of avant-garde, feminist, and Marxist publications. She is best known 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 late 20th century and has been lauded by contemporary poets for her choice and ability to write about urban spaces in her poems. A selection of her poetry was published in 2007, and a biography, Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet (by Terese Svoboda) was published in 2016. Her first book of poetry was published in 1918. On 22 October 1919, Ridge married David Lawson, a fellow radical.

Peter Quartermain described her in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as "the nearest prototype in her time of the proletarian poet of class conflict, voicing social protest or revolutionary idealism."

Renewed scholarly interest 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." Furthermore, Tobin highlights the importance of Ridge's depiction of urban settings in contrast to other modernist writers like Ezra Pound or T.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."

Robert Pinsky, former Poet 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." Pinsky likens Ridge to 18th-century British poet William Blake in her ability to express the perspective of children, evoking, "innocence and experience in a way that blurs the ambiguous boundary between them." Pinsky also notes that Ridge preceded American Hart Crane, known for his long poem The Bridge about the Brooklyn 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."

Quotation My doll Janie has no waist and her body is like a tub with feet on it. Sometimes I beat her but I always kiss her afterwards. When I have kissed all the paint off her body I shall tie a ribbon about it so she shan't look shabby. But it must be blue – it mustn't be pink – pink shows the dirt on her face that won't wash off.

I beat Janie and beat her... but still she smiled... so I scratched her between the eyes with a pin. Now she doesn't love me any more... she scowls... and scowls... though I've begged her to forgive me and poured sugar in the hole at the back of her head.

-- from Sun-Up and Other Poems