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Lola Ridge was described as “one of America’s most important poets” on her death 80 years ago in 1941. Given such an effusive description, it is hard to believe that this Dublin-born poet, anarchist, activist, and journalist has been largely forgotten in America and in the land of her birth.
She was born Rose Emily Ridge in Coal Alley (now Meath Place) in Dublin's Dolphin's Barn in 1873. Both of her parents had roots in Loughrea in Galway. When she was just four years old, her mother took her on a trip to the other side of the world. They set up home in New Zealand, where they settled in Hokitika, a mining town on the west coast of the South Island.
Among the many nicknames given to the young girl was "Lola" and it stuck. Her mother remarried and Lola grew up among a mix of immigrants, indigenous people, and Chinese workers. At age 21, Lola married a gold-mine manager, but the match did not last, and she went to live in Sydney, Australia, with her mother and young son. There she studied art and devoted her spare time to writing poetry. Some of her early work was published in the Canterbury Times and in the Bulletin, a long-running weekly Australian magazine.
Reinvention is a word often used where Lola Ridge is concerned. After moving from Ireland to New Zealand and from there to Australia, her next big move was to America, and it was to be the making of her.
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On arrival in San Francisco in 1907, after travelling under an assumed name, Ridge told US authorities that she was Australian and she also took 10 years off her age.
Settling in Manhattan's Lower East Side, an area popular with Jewish immigrants, it was as if she had found her tribe. Initially, she worked as an artist's model, illustrator, and factory worker. She mixed with the avant-garde writers and poets of Greenwich Village who lived and breathed radical politics.
Ridge began to hone her writing skills by working as the American editor of the modernist literary magazine Broom. She championed unknown writers and boosted the magazine’s circulation by organising a marketing campaign. Her first poetry collection, The Ghetto and Other Poems, was published to critical acclaim in 1918. Using her own experience of having lived in a tenement and worked in a factory, Ridge highlighted what life was like for the Jewish immigrants in the part of New York that she knew intimately.
Her poetry pleaded for justice for the marginalised of the industrial age and for a better society. One of her fellow avant-garde poets, Alfred Kreymborg, said that she was "the woman on the spiritual barricade fighting with her pen against tyranny". In 1923, Ridge won the Guarantor's Prize from the magazine Poetry. The first recipient of this prize was none other than WB Yeats.
Other awards followed and in the 1930s, Ridge received a Guggenheim Fellowship which enabled her to travel to various places around the world including Mexico, Paris and Baghdad, to conduct research and write. The Poetry Society of America bestowed the Shelley Memorial Award on her twice. However, despite these prestigious awards and praise from her peers, Ridge lived in abject poverty and experienced bouts of ill health. Diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis in 1929, Alfred Kreymborg said that she was one of "the frailest of humans physically and the poorest financially". Nevertheless, she continued to write and fight for causes that she believed in.
These included women's rights, workers' rights, and the rights of immigrants. Race riots, anti-Semitism and capital punishment also featured in her poems. Several real-life dramas inspired her writing, including the celebrated case of Sacco and Vanzetti. In 1920, these two Italian-born anarchists were wrongfully found guilty of the robbery and murder of two men who were transporting a factory payroll in Massachusetts.
Ridge was one of those who was arrested at a protest outside the prison where Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927. Their execution sparked demonstrations around the world and propelled Ridge to write a long poem, Firehead, which was called “one of the most extraordinary poems written by an American”.
During her career, she published five books of poetry, with the last, Dance of Fire, appearing in 1935. In the 1940s, the Poetry Society of America awarded an annual prize for “the best unpublished poem on a theme having social significance”. It was called the Lola Ridge Memorial Award but seems to have vanished as some point along the way.
Scholars have reassessed Ridge’s work on several occasions since her death through journal articles and doctoral theses. In recent years, biographies have appeared to shed light on this forgotten crusader who took up her pen to fight for those on the margins and the voiceless.