Lola Ridge
Lola Ridge, born Rose Emily Ridge in Dublin, Ireland, was a notable poet and painter whose life journey took her from Ireland to New Zealand, Australia, and ultimately to the United States. Following a challenging early life, she divorced her first husband and pursued her artistic ambitions, studying at Trinity College in Sydney. After her mother’s death, she reinvented herself as Lola Ridge in San Francisco, where she began her literary career. Ridge later moved to the vibrant artistic community of Greenwich Village in New York City, where she became deeply involved in radical politics and social justice issues, living modestly with her second husband, David Lawson. Her poem cycle "The Ghetto" garnered significant acclaim in 1918, leading to her involvement with influential literary journals like Others and Broom. Despite her stylistic evolution, Ridge maintained a focus on themes of class struggle and proletarian revolution throughout her work. She received several accolades during her lifetime, including the Poetry’s Guarantor’s prize and the Shelley Memorial Award. Although she passed away in 1941, a memorial award in her name was established, yet her contributions to literature have since become less recognized.
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Subject Terms
Lola Ridge
Poet
- Born: December 12, 1873
- Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
- Died: May 19, 1941
- Place of death: Brooklyn, New York
Biography
Born Rose Emily Ridge in Dublin, Ireland, Ridge began a series of personal transformations when, at age thirteen, she moved to New Zealand with her mother. In New Zealand, she first married Peter Webber, a goldmine manager. When that marriage failed, Ridge entered Trinity College in Sydney, Australia, where she studied painting and poetry.
In 1907, after her mother’s death, Ridge moved to San Francisco, where the thirty-three-year old divorcee told people she was twenty-three-year old Lola Ridge, painter and poet. After making her literary debut in the journal Overland Monthly, she picked up stakes again and moved to New York’s Greenwich Village. In New York, Ridge finally found herself, immersing herself in radical politics to the extent of taking up residence in a drafty apartment without even hot water with fellow radical and second husband David Lawson. They remained there long after Ridge’s literary career would have allowed them to move to more comfortable quarters, but Ridge was deeply committed to the struggle of the working class.
After her poem cycle “The Ghetto” appeared in The New Republic in 1918 to considerable acclaim, Ridge became associated with a group of poets involved with the journal Others, which Ridge edited for a number of years. In 1922, she went on to edit Harold Loeb’s journal, Broom, eventually breaking with him over his interest in publishing modernist avant-garde works. Ridge’s own work, although increasingly stylistically conservative, remained focused on the proletarian revolution she never stopped believing in.
Ridge was awarded Poetry’s Guarantor’s prize in 1935, and the next year she won the Shelley Memorial Award. After her death in 1941, the Lola Ridge Memorial Award in Poetry was established in her memory, but she and her work soon faded from public consciousness.