content with conditions as they are that they never disturb themselves as to their
composition or de-composition. These
conditions are subjected to the most uncompromising excoriation I’ve ever seen between two
American bookboards, through the twin media of conditions as they aren’t and as they
should be. In other words, Lola Ridge is a
revolutionist. She is a prototype of the
artist rebels of Russia, Germany, and Austro-Hungary who were the forerunners of the
present r?gime over there–men like Dostoievsky, Gorky, Moussorgsky, Beethoven, Heine,
Hauptmann, Schnitzler. I don’t mean that Lola
Ridge is that horrific creature, a masquerading propagandist. She is first and always an artist. In trumpeting for freedom, going to blows for it,
housing it in an art form, one unconsciously destroys its opposite. Love destroys hate and convention; libertarians,
demi-gods; artists, shackling traditions; form, formalism.
Beethoven hammered out nine symphonies, at least five of which were
revolutionary. Back in Waterloo time, he was denounced as a noisy lunatic, a savage
smashing old forms. On the contrary, he
created Beethoven without destroying Mozart, for Mozart was himself a revolutionary. Without hinting at comparison, I’d like to predict
that Lola Ridge will be charged with lunacy, incendiarism, nihilism, by the average
American who reads her book. The everlasting
minority will proclaim her another free singer, another creator of free form.
The
Ghetto is a magnificent pageant of the Jewish race in nine chapters. In this single work the poet surpasses the
dramatist, David Pinski, who is, in my opinion, easily the leading figure among the Jews
themselves over here, and perhaps the foremost writer for the theatre regardless of race
or language. Her uncanny range of knowledge
of the Jew and her realistic presentation of his lives are heightened and made plastic by
the magic of the detached imagination which hovers always a little above realism and
formulates its relative compositional values. Philosophically,
she is more robust than Pinski. In the final
analysis, she doesn’t see the Jew as a tragic type.
Bartering,
changing, extorting,
Dreaming, debating, aspiring,
Astounding, indestructible
Life of the Ghetto . . . . .
Strong flux of life,
Like a bitter wine
Out of the bloody stills of the world. . . . .
Out of the Passion eternal.
She
sees the future of the race more clearly than the Jews themselves. She prognosticates the Jew as one of the leaders
in the new world, and her vision is borne out by even a casual perusal of the present-day
names of men who are re-moulding Europe. For
sheer passion, deadly accuracy of versatile images, beauty, richness and incisiveness of
epithet, unfolding of adventures, portraiture of emotion and thought, pageantry of
push-carts–the whole lifting, falling, stumbling, mounting to a broad, symphonic rhythm,
interrupted by occasional elfin scherzi–well, The Ghetto was felt by a saint who wasn’t afraid to mix with
the earth, and recorded by a devil who must inevitably return to heaven. Perhaps Lola Ridge is only another Babushka
released from exile to a place of leadership among her contemporaries.
There
are a number of long poems, the best being Flotsam, Faces, The Song
of Iron, Frank Little at Calvary, The Everlasting Return and The Edge. Poe’s sentimental tirade against the long poem is
refuted here. There’s only room for a few
lines from Flotsam, but they give you the plot of the poem, and a reminiscence of
a Rembrandt etching.
This
old man’s head
Has found a woman’s shoulder.
The wind juggles with her shawl
That flaps about them like a sail,
And splashes her red faded hair
Over the salt stubble of his chin.
A light foam is on his lips,
As though dreams surged in him
Breaking and ebbing away. . . . .
And the bare boughs shuffle above him
And the twigs rattle like dice. . . . .
She–diffused like a broken beetle–
Sprawls without grace,
Her face gray as asphalt,
Her jaws sagging as on loosened hinges. . . . .
Shadows ply about her mouth–
Nimble shadows out of the jigging tree,
That dances above her its dance of dry bones.
The
Song of Iron is an exhortation to labor swinging to the rhythm
of a paean, and a warning to "Dictators–late Lords of the Iron." It recalls the exultation of the last movement of
Beethoven’s dance symphony, the Seventh. Underneath
the hammering rhythm, as relentless as a machine and as primitively nude as the animal,
surges the call of mate to mate. It is my
favorite poem in the book. Frank Little
at Calvary is more than a fictitious rendering of the last moments of the I. W. W.
leader, and suggests the part his execution may play in the future. The Edge–And I lay quietly on the drawn
knees of the mountain, staring into the abyss–is an ecstatic nature lyric closing on the
serene cadence,
And I
too got up stiffly from the earth,
And held my heart up like a cup. . . . .
In
some of her short poems, Lola Ridge participates in the crystallization of concentrated
strength achieved by Emily Dickinson, Adelaide Crapsey and H. D. There are, particularly, three in seven lines–D?bris,
Spires and Palestine–which
hark back in form and spirit to the seven-line dedication.
This is D?bris:
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.
And
this is Palestine:
Old
plant of Asia–
Mutilated vine
Holding earth’s leaping sap
In every stem and shoot
That lopped off, sprouts again–
Why should you seek a plateau walled about,
Whose garden is the world?
In
these reconstructive days, liberty is being re-defined, nationalism is approximating
internationalism, the personal is trying to approach the impersonal. For myself, I must say that I cannot feel that
liberty, internationalism and the impersonal will ever be realized. But for every attempt made, however unsuccessful
of accomplishment, all the blood-drops in me are grateful and sing hosannas. They respond to Lola Ridge.
Alfred
Kreymborg, "A Poet in Arms," rev. of The Ghetto and Other Poems, by
Lola Ridge, Poetry, Oct.-March, 1918-19: 335-40.
Louis Untermeyer
Excerpt from "China, Arabia, and Hester Street"
In
spite of Kipling’s most-quoted couplet, there is more than a little in common between the
two hemispheres that are mirrored in these contrasting volumes. Kipling himself has grown to see (vide "The Eyes of Asia") that the Orient and
the Occident do meet, and meet on commoner ground than he ever imagined. So here, in four widely divergent poets, a kinship
is established not only between East and West, but between the Near East, the Far East,
and the East Side. It is a shifting but
universal mysticism that runs through these dissimilar pages, a hushed and sometimes
exalted blend of reality and idealization. Miss
Ridge achieves it most subtly; she accomplishes the greatest results with the least amount
of effort. Nothing is forced or
artificialized in her energetic volume, which contains some of the most vibrant utterances
heard in America since Arturo Giovannitti’s surprisingly neglected "Arrows in the
Gale."
"The
Ghetto" is essentially a book of the city, of its sodden brutalities, its sudden
beauties. It seems strange, when one considers the regiments of students of squalor and
loveliness, that it has remained for one reared far from our chaotic centres to appraise
most poignantly the life that runs through our crowded streets. Miss Ridge brings a fresh background to set off
her sensitive evaluations; her early life in Australia has doubtless enabled her to draw
the American city with such an unusual sense of perspective. Her detachment, instead of blurring her work,
focuses and sharpens it. The city dominates
this book; but the whole industrial world surges beneath it. "The Song of Iron," with its
glorification of Labor, is a veritable paean of triumph.
And yet, cut of these majestically sonorous lines, the still small voice of
the poet makes itself heard–a strangely attenuated voice with a tense accent, a fineness
that, seeming fragile, is like the delicacy of a thin steel spring.
Nowhere
does this distinction of speech maintain itself so strikingly as in the title-poem. Here, except for certain slight circumlocutions,
it approaches perfection. "The
Ghetto" is at once personal in its piercing sympathy and epical in its sweep. It is studded with images that are surprising and
yet never strained or irrelevant; it glows with a color that is barbaric, exotic, and as
local as Grand Street. In this poem Miss
Ridge achieves the sharp line, the arrest and fixation of motion, the condensed clarity
advertised by the Imagists–and so seldom attained by them.
And to this technical surety she brings a far more human passion than any of
them have ever betrayed. Observe this
description of Sodos, the old saddle-maker:
Time
spins like a crazy dial in his brain,
And night by night
I see the love-gesture of his arm
In its green-greasy coat-sleeve
Circling the Book;
And the candles gleaming starkly
On the blotched-paper whiteness of his face
Like a miswritten psalm. . . .
Night by night
I hear his lifted praise,
Like a broken whinnying
Before the Lord’s shut gate.
Or
turn to the picture of the aged scholar who smiles at the "stuffed blue shape backed
by a nickel star," smiles
. . . with the pale irony
Of one who holds
The wisdom of the Talmud stored away
In his mind’s lavender.
And
this, after running the gamut of emotional characterization, is "The Ghetto’s"
final cadence. (I cannot consider the poet’s
italicized addenda as anything but a rather rhetorical envoy which would have been more
effective as a separate poem):
Without,
the frail moon,
Worn to a silvery tissue,
Throws a faint glamour on the roofs,
And down the shadowy spires
Lights tip-toe out . . .
Softly, as when lovers close street doors.
Out of
the Battery
A little wind
Stirs idly–as an arm
Trails over a boat’s side in dalliance–
Rippling the smooth dead surface of the heat,
And Hester Street . . .
Turns on her trampled bed to meet the day.
Elsewhere
the same dignity is maintained, though with less magic.
Miss Ridge sometimes falls into the error of over-capitalizing her metaphors
and the use of "like" as a conjunction. The
other poems echo, if they do not always attain, the fresh beauty of "The
Ghetto." Such poems as "Manhattan
Lights," "Faces," "Frank Little at Calvary," "The
Everlasting Return," the brilliantly ironic "Woman With Jewels," the lyric
"The Tidings"–these are all sharply written in different keys, but they are
intuitively harmonized. They vibrate in
unison. The volume itself is not so much a
piece of music as a cry: a cry not only from the heart of a particularly intense poet, but
from the heart of an intensified age.
From
Louis Untermeyer, "China, Arabia, and Hester Street," rev. of The Ghetto and
Other Poems, by Lola Ridge, The New York Evening Post 1 Feb. 1919, sec. 3:
1+.
Alfred Kreymborg
Excerpt from Our Singing Strength
"Sun-Up"
is a quieter, mellower volume. The title poem
is composed of a series of Imagistic etchings limning incidents out of an Australian
infancy. The speech is authentically
childlike, and the episode with Jude particularly moving.
There are also some adult memoirs called "Monologues." The best poems in the book are the further songs
of rebellion: "Sons of Belial" and
"Reveille." . . .
"Red
Flag," issued two years ago, has a double interest: the entrance of Communist Russia
on the one hand and of traditional sonnets on the other. . . .The sonnets of Miss Ridge
are not the equal of her poems in free verse. None
the less, despite an awkward handling of metrics, her spirit pervades each poem. Of the Russian poems, "Snow-Dance For The
Dead," is a delicate elegy in which children are invited to undulate like the snow
and to "dance beneath the Kremlin towers" for soldiers fallen in the Red
Revolution. If Lola Ridge should ever die,
Russia ought to honor her at the side of Jack Reed. So
should Ireland, Australia, America, and every other land in whose heart freedom is more
than an worn-out word.
From
Alfred Kreymborg, Our Singing Strength, An Outline of American Poetry (1620-1930) (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1929) 486-88.
[Reed
was an American journalist best known for his account of the Bolshevik Revolution in
Russia (1917), Ten Days That Shook The World. He
founded the American Communist Labor Party and was buried in the Kremlin. His book became the basis of Russian filmmaker
Sergei Eisenstein's Ten Days That Shook The World (1927) and Warren Beatty's Reds (1981). Reds is available on Paramount Home Video VHS
1331.]
Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska
Excerpt from A History of American Poetry 1900-1940
Her [Ridge's] devotion was one that
can be described only in terms of a saintliness that Paul Vincent Carroll in his one
felicitous play, Shadow and Substance, gave to his memorable and vision-haunted
Irish heroine. Those who remember Lola Ridge
also remember the large, barely furnished, wind-swept, cold-water loft where she lived in
downtown Manhattan. The loft was verylike
some neatly, frugally kept cold-water flat in Dublin, and the unworldy presence of Lola
Ridge, a slender, tall, softly-speaking, thin-featured woman in a dark dress, heightened
the illusion of being in a place that was not New York, but was well in sight of Dublin’s
purple hills. Even as one rereads her books
one gains the impression that she regarded her social convictions and the writing of
poetry in the same spirit in which an Irish girl invokes the will of God by entering a
convent–but Lola Ridge’s devotion had turned to self-taught and protestant demands, and
the task, the almost impossible task, of making social and religious emotion a unified
being was an effort that remained unfinished at her death.
. . .
In Dance
of Fire Lola Ridge’s poetic maturity
began, and it was evident that in the sonnet sequence, "Via Ignis," which opened
her last volume, Hart Crane’s revival of Christopher Marlowe’s diction left its impression
upon her imagination. The poems were written
at a time when many of those who had read Hart Crane’s The Bridge felt the
implied force of Crane’s improvisations in archaic diction . . . .
Yet
despite their dignity and perhaps because of the high, disinterested motives of their
composition, the sonnets remained disembodied and curiously abstract. It was as though the poet had become aware of her
lyrical gifts too late to find the words with which to express them clearly; felicitous
lines and phrases flowed through the sequence of twenty-eight sonnets, and it is
impossible to reread them without respect for the saintly, unworldy motives that seem to
have inspired the interwoven themes of "Via Ignis." . . . Her moral courage and
her imaginative insights seem to have reached beyond her strength, and if her devotion to
poetry and the frustrations of the poor fell short of accomplishment in the writing of a
wholly memorable poem, her failure was an honorable one.
For the literary historian her verse provides a means of showing that the
younger writers of the 1930’s [sic] were not the first to rediscover the ghettos of New
York in a city that was all too obviously ill at ease between two wars. And few of those who followed the direction she
had taken wrote from the selfless idealism of Lola Ridge. . . .
From
Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska, A History of American Poetry 1900-1940 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1942) 445-47.
[See
also Hart Crane]