Lola Ridge

Lola Ridge (born Rose Emily Ridge; 12 December 1873 – 19 May 1941) was an Irish-born New Zealand-American anarchist and modernist poet, and an influential editor of avant-garde, feminist, and Marxist publications. She is best known for her long poems and poetic sequences, published in numerous magazines and collected in five books of poetry.

Along with other political poets of the early Modernist period, Ridge has received renewed critical attention since the late 20th century and has been lauded by contemporary poets for her choice and ability to write about urban spaces in her poems. A selection of her poetry was published in 2007, and a biography, Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet (by Terese Svoboda) was published in 2016.

Early life

Rose Emily Ridge was born in 1873 in Dublin, Ireland, to Emma Ridge (née Reilly) and Joseph Henry. She was her parents' only surviving child. John Henry died when Ridge was three-years-old, and Ridge and her mother subsequently emigrated to Hokitika, New Zealand, when she was six-years-old. In 1895, she married Peter Webster, the manager of a Hokitika gold mine. In 1903 she left Webster and moved to Sydney, Australia with their three-year-old son Keith to attend Trinity College and study painting at the Sydney Art School with Julian Ashton.

After her mother died, Ridge emigrated to the United States in 1907 and reinvented herself as Lola Ridge, a poet and painter. She settled in San Francisco and published in Overland Monthly. Ridge placed her son in a Californian orphanage and moved to New York City's Greenwich Village. Working as a model for artists, in a factory and as a poet and illustrator, she became involved in working class politics and protests, and worked with Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger. Her first book of poetry was published in 1918. On 22 October 1919, Ridge married David Lawson, a fellow radical.