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. Her first book of poetry was published in 1918. On 22 October 1919, Ridge married David Lawson, a fellow radical.
Peter Quartermain described her in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as "the nearest prototype in her time of the proletarian poet of class conflict, voicing social protest or revolutionary idealism."
Renewed scholarly interest
With renewed scholarly interest in Ridge's work since the late 20th century, selections from her first three books of poetry were published posthumously as, Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems (2007), edited and with an introduction by Daniel Tobin. Tobin notes that Ridge was, "part of the confluence of politics, culture and the burgeoning of women's voices at the advent of modernism to the start of World War II." Furthermore, Tobin highlights the importance of Ridge's depiction of urban settings in contrast to other modernist writers like Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot. For Ridge, the modern city becomes a "community shaped by ritual and mutual need rather than an exposé of modern angst and alienation and dissipation."