Background
Lola Ridge was born as Rose Emily Ridge on December 12, 1873, in Dublin, Ireland. She was the daughter of Joseph Henry and Emma Reilly Ridge. While still a child she moved with her mother to New Zealand and later to Sydney, Australia.
100 Royal Parade, Parkville VIC 3052, Australia
Lola attended Trinity College.
United States
Lola at home
United States
Lola Ridge
United States
Lola Ridge
Lola Ridge was born as Rose Emily Ridge on December 12, 1873, in Dublin, Ireland. She was the daughter of Joseph Henry and Emma Reilly Ridge. While still a child she moved with her mother to New Zealand and later to Sydney, Australia.
Lola attended Trinity College and studied art under Julian Ashton at the Academie Julienne.
Ridge moved to San Francisco in 1907 after her mother died. Though a 33-year-old divorcée, she held great hope for this fresh start. Rose Emily Ridge reinvented herself as Lola Ridge, poet and painter, and described herself as being only 23 years old. This fib about her age later caused friends to remark on her premature ill health and delicacy, and even the New York Times printed her age as 57 and not 67 at her death in 1941. Ridge made her literary debut in North America in the journal Overland Monthly. Having left her mark on California’s literary scene, she moved to New York’s Greenwich Village.
For a while, Ridge supported herself writing advertising copy and popular fiction. She finally gave up this work to preserve her artistic integrity and energy and to remain true to her increasingly radical politics. By April 1909 she had published a poem in Emma Goldman’s radical journal Mother Earth. In 1911, Ridge began working as an artists’ model, an illustrator, a factory worker and an educational organizer.
In 1918 the New Republic published Ridge’s sequence of poems called “The Ghetto.” The poem instantly drew attention, and later that year she published this and other poems in The Ghetto and Other Poems. Likely influenced by her own experience living on the Lower East Side, many of the forty-three free-verse poems explore the life of Jewish immigrants in New York City’s ghettos. Critics found the work rough but powerful. Ridge began publishing more of her poetry in journals such as the Dial, the New Republic, Poetry and the Literary Digest.
Ridge became involved with a circle of poets involved in the journal Others, including William Carlos Williams, Alfred Kreymborg, Marianne Moore, and Waldo Frank. She worked as an associate editor of the journal until 1919, traveling to Chicago as a lecturer for The Others Lecture Bureau. Ridge held regular gatherings in her home even after Others ceased publication.
In 1920 Ridge published a new book, Sun-up, and Other Poems, a collection of free-verse imagist poems. The title poem, based on Ridge’s childhood, made the greatest impression on critics.
Ridge became the American editor for Harold Loeb’s Broom in 1922. As part of her pay, she received the use of an apartment adjacent to the office in the basement of Loeb’s estranged wife, Marjorie Content. What little salary Ridge earned was just barely enough to cover her living expenses. Ridge was assertive in her capacity, insisting on occasionally publishing an all-American edition to give Loeb a vacation and Europe greater exposure to American art. Ridge held weekly Broom salons, at which she momentarily gave up her vow of poverty to feed tea and cakes to other writers. She also provided encouragement to writers and gathered pieces for Broom. An artist involved with the magazine, Matthew Josephson, author of Life among the Surrealists: A Memoir, felt Ridge was often frustrated by Loeb’s rejection of her recommendations. Whether or not this is true, Ridge did resign over Loeb and Matthew Josephson’s increasingly modernist, avant-garde and Dadaist choices. Idealistic and political, she found herself at odds with strict modernism.
In the following years, Ridge’s own work became stylistically conservative, often veering towards the mystical and spiritual. She remained an active social protestor, and in 1927 she published Red Flag, a collection of poems celebrating the Russian revolution. Babette Deutsch praised the book in New York Herald Tribune Books when she wrote, “The fire, the earnestness, the bitter and honey savors are here as in her earlier work. She has been wrought upon by the years on their passing, but she has not been changed by them.” In 1929 Ridge went to the artist retreat Yaddo in upstate New York to complete her next work, Firehead.
Ridge traveled to Mexico on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935, and published Dance of Fire, a less successful book. Though Ridge’s fire and light metaphors for humanity’s revolutionary spirit have occurred in previous work, her language and symbolism are more opaque in Dance of Fire.
Lola Ridge died May 19, 1941, in her home in Brooklyn, at the age of 67.
Ridge did not join any political party, but was active in radical causes. She protested against the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, and was among those arrested that day. In the 1930s, she supported the defence of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, who had been framed for a 1916 bombing at the Preparedness Day Parade in San Francisco.
Lola married Peter Webster, a gold mine manager, in 1895. After the divorce she married David Lawson on October 22, 1919.