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The Politics of Freedom

Lola Ridge

Mother earth (by Berkman, Alexander)
Sun-Up and Other Poems (by Ridge, Lola)
The Ghetto (by Lola Ridge)
The Bookman Anthology of Verse (by Farrar, John)

I love those spirits
That men stand off and point at,
Or shudder and hood up their souls—
Those ruined ones,
Where Liberty has lodged an hour
And passed like flame,
Bursting asunder the too small house. (The Ghetto and Other Poems, p. 47)

Lola Ridge is a perfect example of a working class poet. Politically active, she associated with the likes of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and participated in many marches and protests. She was arrested at the protest of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchists and Italian immigrants. She wrote often about factory work, race and gender issues, gay rights, and the rights of immigrants. Her first published book, The Ghetto and Other Poems, centers on Jewish immigrants and life in the Lower East Side tenements of New York City.

Charge the blast furnace, workman…
Open the valves—
Drive the fires high…
(Night is above the gates)… (The Ghetto, p. 50)

Born in Dublin on December 12, 1873, she grew up in the mining towns of New Zealand and Australia. She emigrated to America in her mid-thirties and established herself as a pivotal figure in the American literary scene. The success of her first book landed her as the editor of Broom and other avant-garde journals which were key in bringing avant-garde art and literature to the United States.

What did freedom look like, what were its costs and by-products, and where did the modern female fit within the conversation? In a 1919 speech titled “Woman and the Creative Will,” she tackled the topic of why there were no great female artists. “I shall try to show that woman has not only a creative will, but a very great future in creative art,” she began, and thoroughly proved with her life. In "Freedom," she writes:

Let men be free!
Hate is the price
Of servitude, paid covertly; and vice
But the unclean recoil of tortured flesh
Whipped through the centuries within a mesh
Spun out of priestly art.
Oh men, arise, be free!—Who breaks one bar
Of tyranny in this so bitter star
Has cleansed its bitterness in part. (Mother Earth, p. 97)

As the Victorian era dragged its feet into the new century, Ridge remained aware of the restrictions imposed by social norms. She was a bigamist, abandoned her child to an orphanage, and struggled with drugs and anorexia; but, she remained doggedly committed to her art and nurturing the American avant-garde. Were she a male poet, this story might not seem so outstanding. Ridge biographer Terese Svoboda muses in Lithub article "Why Has Poet Lola Ridge Disappeared?" that these details are some of the key reasons many biographers have avoided Ridge's story.

Upon her death, she was lauded as one of the best American poets. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the New York Times called her poem “Firehead” one of the most extraordinary poems written by an American. Despite her fame, the coming years purged her from the history books. Svoboda comments,

… proletariat modernism as a movement was buried under the anti-liberal, anti-female, and anti-experiment sentiments of the WWII period and the McCarthyism that followed. Good friends with William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane and Jean Toomer, Ridge’s legacy was not restored due to a continued critical disdain for political poetry, a devaluation of women’s contributions to the genre and the revival of formal poetry."

She may now be seeing a resurgence as both a groundbreaking, feminine force, and a truly original poet.

Hallo, Metropolitan—
Ubiquitous windows staring all ways,
Red eye notching the darkness.
No use to ogle that slip of a moon.
This midnight the moon,
Playing virgin after all her encounters,
Will break another date with you. (Sun Up and Other Poems, p. 28)

By Thad Higa