New Hibernia Review

Born Rose Emily Ridge in Dublin on December 12,1873, the woman who would reinvent herself to become perhaps the most impassioned—and certainly the most authentic—of the proletarian poets of the New York modernist avant-garde emigrated with her mother at the age of thirteen to New Zealand where, eight years later, she would marry the manager of a gold mine. To look ahead thirty years from the comfortable, upwardly mobile life she had chosen in 1895 on the other side of the world is to gain some measure of insight into the transformation she had undergone. In 1927, Alfred Kreymborg—one of the leading avant-garde poets of the day—describedRidge as "the frailest of humans physically and the poorest financially," though nevertheless "the woman on the spiritual barricade fighting with her pen against tyranny."¹ After her marriage to Peter Webster failed and her mother died and she began to pursue her new ambition as a painter and poet, Lola Ridge emigrated to the United States in 1907, staying for a brief time in California, then settling in Manhattan's Greenwich Village and, later, on the Lower East Side. So began her life among the leading left-wing literary and political figures of the day, among them Kay Boyle, John Dos Passos, Harold Loeb, and Emma Goldman.

As an activist of revolutionary fervor living in abject poverty herself, over the next thirty-five years, until her death in Brooklyn in 1941, Lola Ridge composed some of the most vivid and politically conscious poems of her day. At the same time, her presence among New York's avant-garde places her work within the context of such luminaries of modernist American poetry as Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Hart Crane. The peripetetic literary and cultural sojourns of the "Lost Generation," to which Ridge also had strong if contentious ties, also provide an evocative counterpoint to both the literary and civic life she herself decided to lead. So, too, do both the right-wing modernist programs of expatriate mandarins Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and the pure poetries of the Dadaists. From this perspective, Lola Ridge appears to be a [End Page 65] notable lone figure standing amidst the crowds of our American literary history, at once recognizable in the wider aesthetic and cultural currents of her time, but nevertheless curiously otherwise—a vivid original whose life and work embody the tumultuous confluence of forces that shaped the twentieth century.

To picture Lola Ridge as a defiant and heroic loner is not to engage in a kind of romanticism that she herself would refuse to embrace. Like Yeats without the imaginative infrastructure of a spiritual system, by the time she arrived in San Francisco and moved to Greenwich Village Ridge had already invented an "idealized version of herself."² "Rose Emily" had become "Lola," a woman ten years younger than her actual age, as well as a poet, artist, and revolutionary. In this regard she reminds one of another "Lola"—Lola Montez, born Maria Delores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert in Limerick in 1824 before recreating herself as the Spanish "Spider Dancer" and nineteenth-century America's embodiment of immodesty. Both women were Irish emigrants who were forced to rely on their own powers of self-imagination to establish places for themselves in their respective worlds; both became famous in their time; both turned to religion; and both embraced the plight of the poor and the outcast.

Unlike Montez, however, whose beauty and sensuality were legendary, Ridge assumed the visage of a saint and ascetic: tall and thin, "frail enough to be blown away like a leaf" according to Kay Boyle.³ The image of Lola Ridge as an impassioned and even saintly idealist wasting with tuberculosis, emerges in Katherine Anne Porter's description of the protest outside Charlestown Prison in Boston on August 22, 1927, where the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were to...