Criticism On Ridge Essay Research Paper F
Criticism On Ridge Essay, Research Paper
F. Hackett
“ Lola Ridge & # 8217 ; s Poetry ”
One of
the hardest things in life, particularly literary life, is to acknowledge one & # 8217 ; s important
emotions. Appropriate emotions are rather a
different narrative. Almost everyone, from
President Wilson down to the cheapest author of advertisement transcript, has had pattern in
run intoing circumstance with merely the right sort of propitiatory words. But outside this game of rhetoric, which is non
ever so easy, there is the infinitely harder and finer art of self-expression & # 8211 ; the art
of determining every bit good as uncovering ego. To
give voice to important emotions & # 8211 ; that is the kernel of poesy which in bend is the
kernel of literature. What does one mean by
“ important ” ? One means, I
suppose, the emotions which determine personality and mentality and association and behavior. One means the emotions that are motor, that have
life in them and legs under them, whether they crawl underneath the surface of things or
come out above the surface and face a universe. And
the poet, for me, is the individual who is so related to life by imaginativeness and speculation
that he can open out his emotions and happen them genuinely important & # 8211 ; important to himself
and to the individual who is still shut in.
. . .
One
who seeks important emotions instead than appropriate emotions in Miss Lola Ridge is non
likely to be unrequited. On the whole, it
must be said, she does non look absolutely at easiness in her art, and her lights are
most often the lightning-flash of analogy instead than the lyricality of full and steady
ownership. But the bosom of the affair, the
individual of emotional significances, is at that place. Miss
Lola Ridge is capable of that powerful ecstasy on the wings of existent feeling which
brings a new universe into vision. She is
capable of massing beady feelings until they seem to hold the integrity of a individual
perceptual experience. More than one time the wings of her
experiencing seem to fall hitch. She fails to portion
the complete significance of which she herself is convinced. But when she does win, when the comprehensiveness of
her realisations is controlled and embodied, she is entitled to all the glorification that is shed
by the name of poet.
In her
longest verse form, The Ghetto, Miss Ridge seems to me to vibrate someplace between
poesy and prose. A distinguished vocalization The
Ghetto surely is. It is beyond uncertainty
the most graphic and sensitive and lovely incarnation that exists in American literature of
that multilateral organ transplant of Jewish city-dwellers which coarseness dismisses with a
laugh or a mockery. The fact that Miss Ridge is
non a Jewess, is herself foreigner and transplanted, does non unfit her vision. On the reverse, she is disengaged so that she can
move from world to world with a pure sense of the inundation that immerses her. Could anyone less free see the “ scraggy custodies
that hover like two hawks, ” or “ newsboys with combating eyes, ” or a little
miss & # 8217 ; s “ braided caput, glistening as a black-bird & # 8217 ; s ” ?
The foreigner entirely, possibly, could detect the “ natural immature seed of
Israel ” and that insulted senior who, unperturbed, “ maintain his acrimonious peace. ”
What
if a stiff arm and stuffed bluish form,
Backed by a nickel star,
Does prod him on,
Taking his proud forbearance for humbleness. . . .
All troughs are as one
To that old race that has been thrust
From off the kerbstones of the universe. . . .
And he smiles with the picket sarcasm
Of one who holds
The wisdom of the Talmud stored away
In his head & # 8217 ; s lavender.
How
deep and sensitive the humanity of this transition, and yet The Ghetto as a whole
does non look to me to possess the significance of emotion which would do it a great
verse form, or even a verse form. It ends with an
apostrophe to Life itself, but that minister plenipotentiary is reasonably about rhetoric. It is undistinguished compared to the stanza that
precedes it, get downing
Out of
the Battery
A small air current
Stirs lazily & # 8211 ; as an arm
Trails over a boat & # 8217 ; s side in dawdling & # 8211 ;
Rippling the smooth dead surface of the heat.
Why
has The Ghetto the mastermind of prose instead than poetry? Because, as I see it, it ne’er achieves that
synthesis to which rime is so frequently an assistance, the synthesis of an intense emotion ne’er
relinquished. What is the intense emotion
conveyed by The Ghetto? None. Its suggestions and evocations are beautiful, and
it is fortunate that Miss Ridge gave signifier to them, but the significance they have for her
does non look concluding, and poesy is concluding.
But
brief conclusivenesss are scattered all through The Ghetto. Seldom does Miss Ridge fail to maintain imaginativeness
swung unfastened by her usage of analogy. Take these
lines in Flotsam:
Figures
impetus upon the benches
With no more rustle than dropped foliage settling & # 8211 ;
Slovenly figures like unfastened packages,
And documents wrapped about their articulatio genuss. . . .
These
are non wretched nisuss after freshness. Miss
Ridge of course sees “ a glimpse like a blow ” or lay eyes on a down-and-out adult female on
the benches, “ diffused like a broken beetle, ” or “ caf? s glittering like
beady dentitions, ” or “ beetle-backed limousines ” or “ the drawn articulatio genuss of
the mountain, ” or “ the snow with its devilish and satiny susurration. ” Each of these figures is merely and illuminative,
non chiefly witty like the mention to a gaudy chapeau, “ With its flower God ne’er
idea of. ” Miss Ridge is much more likely to be deep than witty, as when
she envisages the hapless smile female parent “ with eyes like vacant tonss. ”
The
clasp of Miss Ridge & # 8217 ; s poesy is most unafraid in those few verse forms of hers where her
inspiration transcends her watchful creativity. “ The
Everlasting Return ” is her best inspiration, it seems to me, among the long verse form,
and her verse form of the Irish Rebellion of 1916 seems to me much the most perfect realisation
of what I pedantically call important emotion. It
is called the Tidings ( Easter, 1916 ) .
Censored
prevarications that mimic truth. . .
Censored truth every bit pale as fright. . .
My bosom is like a arousal bell & # 8211 ;
And but the dead to hear. . .
My
bosom is like a female parent bird,
Circling of all time higher,
And the nest-tree rimmed about
By a wood fire. . .
My
bosom is like a lover foiled
By a broken step & # 8211 ;
They are contending tonight in Sackville street,
And I am non at that place.
Here
there is something more than fervent observation, something more than a fable of the reign
of labour. It is in wordss like this, and the
words of the East St. Louis combustion of a Negro babe, that Miss Ridge truly forgets her
duties to literature and fuses her emotion into her look and becomes a full
poet. She loses her art to salvage it. But of class in the other nisuss of her art it
is imperative to retrieve that Miss Ridge is an experimenter rather clearly centered in
that universe of category battle where poesy itself is still an aberrance. In worsening to follow old signifiers, in preferring to
give even conventional sentiments about the north wind the release of free poetry, Miss
Ridge is obviously endeavoring to make a place unencumbered by the methods appropriate
to a different civilisation. This nisus is
non ever brought to a happy stoping in The Ghetto verse form. Miss Ridge is non full maestro of any method or
medium. But her experiment is so evidently
necessary to her, so evidently portion of a echt development, that it would be absurd to
keep up her imperfectnesss as something in the nature of things.
F.
Hackett, “ Lola Ridge & # 8217 ; s Poetry, ” rpm. of The Ghetto and Other Poems, by
Lola Ridge, The New Republic, 16 Nov. 1918: 76-77.
Conrad Aiken
Excerpts from “ The Literary Abbozzo ”
The
Italians use the word abbozzo & # 8211 ; intending a study or unfinished work & # 8211 ; non merely in
mention to pulling or painting but besides as a sculptural term. The group of unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo
in Florence, for illustration, takes this name ; they are called merely abbozzi. The rock is still unsmooth & # 8211 ; the construct has merely
merely begun to look ; it has non yet entirely or freely emerged. There is an grandness in the manner in which the
powerful figures seem fighting with the stone for release.
And it is no admiration that Rodin and others have seen in this peculiar phase
of a piece of sculpture a intimation for a new method based on the clear plenty esthetic value
of what might be called the provokingly uncomplete.
. . .
Here
is a graphic personality [ Ridge ] , even a powerful one, clearly cognizant of the peculiar
experience which is its ain & # 8211 ; a non excessively frequent gift.
It rejoices in the cyclosis and tawdrily lighted multiplicity of the metropolis:
it turns thirstily toward the semi-tropical fruitfulness of the meaner streets and tenement
territories. Here it is the human point that
most attracts Miss Ridge & # 8211 ; Jews, for the most portion, seen darkly and warmly against a
background of societal consciousness, of defiance even.
She arranges her figures for us with a muscular force which seems masculine ;
it is remarkable to come upon a book written by a adult female in which energy is so clearly a more
natural quality than grace. This is
sometimes simply blatant, it is true. When
she compares Time to a paralytic, “ A mildewed giant above the states knee bend, ”
one fails to react. Nor is one moved
exactly as Miss Ridge might trust when she tells us of a air current which “ olfactory organs among
them like a rotter that roots about the bosom. ” It
is evident from the frequence with which such falsenesss occur & # 8211 ; peculiarly in the
subdivision called Labor & # 8211 ; that Miss Ridge is a trifle obsessed with the concern of being
powerful: she forgets that the harsh is merely rough when used meagerly, the loud merely loud
when it emerges from the lull. She is
unsure plenty of herself to cover in abrasivenesss sweeping and to shout them.
But
with due allowances made for these extravagancies & # 8211 ; the extravagancies of the brilliant but
slightly excessively abounding recreational & # 8211 ; one must pay one & # 8217 ; s respects to Miss Ridge for her very
frequent verbal felicitousnesss, for her images brilliantly lighted, for a few shorter verse forms which
are bunchs of glistening phrases, and for the human profusion of one longer verse form, The
Ghetto, in which the vigorous and the stamp are laudably fused. Here Miss Ridge & # 8217 ; s reactions are fullest and
truest. Here she is under no irresistible impulse to be
strident. And it is exactly because here
she is comparatively most successful that one is most awkwardly witting of the defects
inherent in the whole method for which Miss Ridge stands.
This is a usage of the “ provokingly uncomplete ” & # 8211 ; as concerns
signifier & # 8211 ; in which, unluckily, the provocative has been left out. If we consider once more, for a minute, Michelangelo & # 8217 ; s
abbozzi we become cognizant how somewhat, by comparing, Miss Ridge & # 8217 ; s figures have
begun to emerge. Have they emerged plenty to
propose the clear overtone of the thing completed? The
appeal of the uncomplete is of class in its positing of a norm which it suggests,
attacks, retreats from, or at points really touches.
The shade of completeness alternately radiances and dims. But for Miss Ridge, these nuances of signifier do
non come frontward. She is content to utilize for
the most portion a direct prose, with merely seldom an interpellation of the metrical, and the
metrical of a non peculiarly adept kind. The
latent harmoniousnesss are ne’er evoked.
One
hesitates to do suggestions. Miss Ridge
might hold to give excessively much energy and profusion to obtain a greater beauty of signifier:
the attempt might turn out her undoing. By the
grade of her success or failure in this project, nevertheless, she would go cognizant of
her existent capacities as an creative person. Or is she
wise plenty to cognize beforehand that the attempt would be bootless, and that she has
already reached what is for her the right pitch? That
would be a confession but it would go forth us, even so, a broad border for gratitude.
From
Conrad Aiken, “ The Literary Abbozzo, ” rpm. of The Ghetto and Other Poems,
by Lola Ridge, The Dial 25 Jan. 1919: 83-84.
Babette Deutsch
Excerpts from “ Two First Books ”
[ Poet and critic Deutsch reappraisals
Maxwell Bodenheim ‘s Minna and Myself and Lola Ridge ‘s The Ghetto and Other
Poems. ]
They [ Bodenheim and Ridge ] attack
experience with the wantonness of their clarity. But
to read Bodenheim is to listen to bells and flutes in a gallery that throws strange
reverberations from its secret corners. To read Lola
Ridge is to shiver with the throb of grim engines and the cock on the paving
of numberless nervous pess.
. . .
To
come from these quaint back streets [ of Bodenheim ] into the loud jostling of “ The
Ghetto ” is to be cognizant of the power of the latter at the cost of its strength. That may be nil more than the ultimate
difference between the symbolist and the realist. But
symbolism divorced from world is strictly bland, and a pragmatism excessively blunt is like the
wastes victory of the mind. . . . Not
that Lola Ridge is either cold or insensitive. But
her vision is no less limited than Bodenheim & # 8217 ; s, if engaged with another scene, and her
force is sometimes blatant instead than austere. It
is funny that one should experience her the more immature of the two, more sincere in her
emotions and less earnest, or possibly merely less concentrated in her art. There are flashes of penetration every bit clear as his, but
she can non prolong her onslaught. She works on a
larger canvas, but her colourss are all dull rubies, orange, and dark black. Bodenheim & # 8217 ; s metaphors may come hurtling like
seven amazing torchs traversing, braided, and swung through the dark sky. Lola Ridge throws the freshness of sudden lamps, crisp
and electric, but individual and scattered. She
is capable of such a flawlessness as demoing the Friday dark tapers,
“ Yoke
other visible radiations,
Associating the tenements
Like an eternal supplication. ”
Or of
that concluding arresting image, wherein Hester street,
“ Like
a forlorn adult female over-born
By many babes at her nipples,
Bends on her trampled bed to run into the twenty-four hours. ”
And
she is besides capable of such an anomalous confusion of New York & # 8217 ; s east side with the
conventions of New England as to talk of an old Hebrew as
“ .
. . one who holds
The wisdom of the Talmud stored away
In his head & # 8217 ; s lavendar. ”
About
all her verse forms are excessively long. Bodenheim may
pour a bright spirits into excessively narrow a jar, that will overrun in sweet beads on its lip. Lola Ridge brews a darker potion, an “ Fe
vino ” , but it lies in deep flagons, heavy to raise.
It is in the brief glance, the dark graphic play of a phrase, that she
challenges ugliness and poorness and ineffectual decease. She
should be able to do hokkus that would bite and rip as her semi-epical attempts do in
sudden acute minutes. An angry rabble is
awful, but its choler is a thing diffused and vague contrasted with the deep strength
of an person.
Both
of these poets are more acute when one reads individual verse forms than when one accepts an
full book. Bodenheim & # 8217 ; s nuance is disposed to
go a maze of herding images ; Lola
Ridge & # 8217 ; s vigorous apprehensiveness of life is disposed to fall to the humdrum savageness of a
membranophone. Each retains, nevertheless, a rare and
exciting relish ; the challenging strength of those content to be lone, the beauty of
those in whom the passions of the organic structure are no more imperative than the passions of the
head.
From
Babette Deutsch, “ Two First Books, ” rpm. of The Ghetto and Other Poems,
by Lola Ridge, The Little Review, May 1919: 65-68.
Alfred Kreymborg
“ A Poet in Arms ”
This
book is dedicated, in an introductory verse form, To The
American People. In order to appreciate
to the full the challenge of its seven lines, one should cognize that Lola Ridge is Australian by
birth. She came to this state fourteen
old ages ago.
Will
you feast with me, American people?
But what have I that shall look good to you!
On my board are acrimonious apples
And honey served on irritants,
And in my flagons fluid Fe
Hot from the melting pots.
How shall such menu entice you!
Indeed,
this little book holds Lis
ttle which could lure mean American gentlefolk who are so
content with conditions as they are that they ne’er disturb themselves as to their
composing or de-composition. These
conditions are subjected to the most sturdy abrasion I & # 8217 ; ve of all time seen between two
American bookboards, through the duplicate media of conditions as they aren & # 8217 ; T and as they
should be. In other words, Lola Ridge is a
revolutionary. She is a paradigm of the
artist Rebels of Russia, Germany, and Austro-Hungary who were the precursors of the
present R? gime over there & # 8211 ; work forces like Dostoievsky, Gorky, Moussorgsky, Beethoven, Heine,
Hauptmann, Schnitzler. I don & # 8217 ; t intend that Lola
Ridge is that hideous animal, a masquerading propagandist. She is first and ever an creative person. In trumpeting for freedom, traveling to blows for it,
lodging it in an art signifier, one unconsciously destroys its opposite. Love destroys hatred and convention ; libertarians,
demi-gods ; creative persons, pinioning traditions ; signifier, formalism.
Beethoven hammered out nine symphonic musics, at least five of which were
revolutionist. Back in Waterloo clip, he was denounced as a noisy moonstruck, a barbarian
nailing old signifiers. On the contrary, he
created Beethoven without destructing Mozart, for Mozart was himself a radical. Without suggesting at comparing, I & # 8217 ; vitamin Ds like to foretell
that Lola Ridge will be charged with madness, arson, nihilism, by the norm
American who reads her book. The everlasting
minority will proclaim her another free vocalist, another Godhead of free signifier.
The
Ghetto is a brilliant pageant of the Judaic race in nine chapters. In this individual work the poet surpasses the
playwright, David Pinski, who is, in my sentiment, easy the prima figure among the Hebrews
themselves over here, and possibly the first author for the theatre regardless of race
or linguistic communication. Her eldritch scope of cognition
of the Jew and her realistic presentation of his lives are heightened and made plastic by
the thaumaturgy of the detached imaginativeness which hovers ever a small above pragmatism and
formulates its comparative compositional values. Philosophically,
she is more robust than Pinski. In the concluding
analysis, she doesn & # 8217 ; t see the Jew as a tragic type.
Bartering,
altering, extorting,
Dreaming, debating, aspiring,
Astounding, indestructible
Life of the Ghetto. . . . .
Strong flux of life,
Like a acrimonious vino
Out of the bloody stills of the universe. . . . .
Out of the Passion eternal.
She
sees the hereafter of the race more clearly than the Jews themselves. She prognosticates the Jew as one of the leaders
in the new universe, and her vision is borne out by even a insouciant perusing of the contemporary
names of work forces who are re-moulding Europe. For
sheer passion, lifelessly truth of versatile images, beauty, profusion and trenchancy of
name, flowering of escapades, portrayal of emotion and idea, pageantry of
push-carts & # 8211 ; the whole lifting, falling, faltering, mounting to a wide, symphonic beat,
interrupted by occasional elfin scherzi & # 8211 ; good, The Ghetto was felt by a saint who wasn & # 8217 ; t afraid to blend with
the Earth, and recorded by a Satan who must necessarily return to heaven. Possibly Lola Ridge is merely another Babushka
released from expatriate to a topographic point of leading among her coevalss.
There
are a figure of long verse forms, the best being Flotsam, Faces, The Song
of Iron, Frank Little at Calvary, The Everlasting Return and The Edge. Poe & # 8217 ; s sentimental philippic against the long verse form is
refuted here. There & # 8217 ; s merely room for a few
lines from Flotsam, but they give you the secret plan of the verse form, and a reminiscence of
a Rembrandt etching.
This
old adult male & # 8217 ; s caput
Has found a adult female & # 8217 ; s shoulder.
The air current juggles with her shawl
That flaps about them like a canvas,
And splashes her ruddy bleached hair
Over the salt chaff of his mentum.
A light froth is on his lips,
As though dreams surged in him
Breaking and ebbing off. . . . .
And the bare boughs shuffle above him
And the twigs rattling like die. . . . .
She & # 8211 ; diffused like a broken beetle & # 8211 ;
Sprawls without grace,
Her face grey as asphalt,
Her jaws sagging as on disentangled flexible joints. . . . .
Shadows ply about her oral cavity & # 8211 ;
Agile shadows out of the jigging tree,
That dances above her its dance of dry castanetss.
The
Song of Iron is an exhortation to labour singing to the beat
of a encomium, and a warning to “ Dictators & # 8211 ; late Godheads of the Iron. ” It recalls the jubilance of the last motion of
Beethoven & # 8217 ; s dance symphonic music, the Seventh. Underneath
the pound beat, every bit relentless as a machine and as originally bare as the animate being,
surges the call of mate to copulate. It is my
favourite verse form in the book. Frank Small
at Calvary is more than a fabricated rendition of the last minutes of the I. W. W.
leader, and suggests the portion his executing may play in the hereafter. The Edge & # 8211 ; And I lay softly on the drawn
articulatio genuss of the mountain, gazing into the abysm & # 8211 ; is an enraptured nature lyric shutting on the
calm meter,
And I
excessively got up stiffly from the Earth,
And held my bosom up like a cup. . . . .
In
some of her short verse form, Lola Ridge participates in the crystallisation of concentrated
strength achieved by Emily Dickinson, Adelaide Crapsey and H. D. There are, peculiarly, three in seven lines & # 8211 ; D? Berith,
Steeples and Palestine & # 8211 ; which
hark back in signifier and spirit to the seven-line dedication.
This is D? Berith:
I
love those liquors
That work forces stand off and point at,
Or frisson and goon up their psyches & # 8211 ;
Those ruined 1s,
Where Liberty has lodged an hr
And passed like fire,
Bursting asunder the excessively little house.
And
this is Palestine:
Old
works of Asia & # 8211 ;
Mutilated vine
Keeping Earth & # 8217 ; s jumping sap
In every root and shoot
That lopped off, sprouts once more & # 8211 ;
Why should you seek a tableland walled approximately,
Whose garden is the universe?
In
these rehabilitative yearss, autonomy is being re-defined, patriotism is come closing
internationalism, the personal is seeking to near the impersonal. For myself, I must state that I can non experience that
autonomy, internationalism and the impersonal will of all time be realized. But for every effort made, nevertheless unsuccessful
of achievement, all the blood-drops in me are thankful and sing hosannas. They respond to Lola Ridge.
Alfred
Kreymborg, “ A Poet in Arms, ” rpm. 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
malice of Kipling & # 8217 ; s most-quoted pair, there is more than a small 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 run into, and run into on common man land than he of all time imagined. So here, in four widely divergent poets, a affinity
is established non merely between East and West, but between the Near East, the Far East,
and the East Side. It is a shifting but
cosmopolitan mysticism that runs through these dissimilar pages, a muted and sometimes
exalted blend of world and idealisation. Miss
Ridge achieves it most subtly ; she accomplishes the greatest consequences with the least sum
of attempt. Nothing is forced or
artificialized in her energetic volume, which contains some of the most vivacious vocalizations
heard in America since Arturo Giovannitti & # 8217 ; s surprisingly neglected “ Arrows in the
Gale. ”
“ The
Ghetto ” is basically a book of the metropolis, of its soppy ferociousnesss, its sudden
beauties. It seems unusual, when one considers the regiments of pupils of sordidness and
comeliness, that it has remained for one reared far from our helter-skelter Centres to measure
most affectingly the life that runs through our crowded streets. Miss Ridge brings a fresh background to put off
her sensitive ratings ; her early life in Australia has doubtless enabled her to pull
the American metropolis with such an unusual sense of position. Her withdrawal, alternatively of film overing her work,
focal points and sharpens it. The metropolis dominates
this book ; but the whole industrial universe surges beneath it. “ The Song of Iron, ” with its
glory of Labor, is a regular encomium of victory.
And yet, cut of these majestically heavy lines, the still little voice of
the poet makes itself heard & # 8211 ; a queerly attenuated voice with a tense speech pattern, a choiceness
that, looking fragile, is like the daintiness of a thin steel spring.
Nowhere
does this differentiation of address maintain itself so strikingly as in the title-poem. Here, except for certain little periphrasiss,
it approaches flawlessness. “ The
Ghetto ” is at one time personal in its piercing understanding and epical in its expanse. It is studded with images that are surprising and
yet ne’er strained or irrelevant ; it glows with a colour that is barbarian, alien, and as
local as Grand Street. In this verse form Miss
Ridge achieves the crisp line, the apprehension and arrested development of gesture, the condensed lucidity
advertised by the Imagists & # 8211 ; and so rarely attained by them.
And to this proficient surety she brings a far more human passion than any of
them have of all time betrayed. Detect this
description of Sodos, the old saddle-maker:
Time
spins like a brainsick dial in his encephalon,
And dark by dark
I see the love-gesture of his arm
In its green-greasy coat-sleeve
Circling the Book ;
And the tapers glittering starkly
On the blotched-paper whiteness of his face
Like a miswritten Psalm. . . .
Night by dark
I hear his upraised congratulations,
Like a broken whinnying
Before the Lord & # 8217 ; s close gate.
Or
bend to the image of the aged bookman who smiles at the “ stuffed bluish form backed
by a nickel star, ” smilings
. . . with the picket sarcasm
Of one who holds
The wisdom of the Talmud stored away
In his head & # 8217 ; s lavender.
And
this, after running the gamut of emotional word picture, is “ The Ghetto & # 8217 ; s ”
concluding meter. ( I can non see the poet & # 8217 ; s
italicized supplement as anything but a instead rhetorical minister plenipotentiary which would hold been more
effectual as a separate verse form ) :
Without,
the frail Moon,
Worn to a silvery tissue,
Throws a weak glamor on the roofs,
And down the shadowy steeples
Lights tip-toe out. . .
Softly, as when lovers near street doors.
Out of
the Battery
A small air current
Stirs lazily & # 8211 ; as an arm
Trails over a boat & # 8217 ; s side in dawdling & # 8211 ;
Rippling the smooth dead surface of the heat,
And Hester Street. . .
Bends on her trampled bed to run into the twenty-four hours.
Elsewhere
the same self-respect is maintained, though with less thaumaturgy.
Miss Ridge sometimes falls into the mistake of over-capitalizing her metaphors
and the usage of “ similar ” as a concurrence. The
other verse forms echo, if they do non ever attain, the fresh beauty of “ The
Ghetto. ” Such verse forms as “ Manhattan
Lights, ” “ Faces, ” “ Frank Little at Calvary, ” “ The
Everlasting Return, ” the brightly dry “ Woman With Jewels, ” the words
“ The Tidings ” & # 8211 ; these are all aggressively written in different keys, but they are
intuitively harmonized. They vibrate in
unison. The volume itself is non so much a
piece of music as a call: a call non merely from the bosom of a peculiarly intense poet, but
from the bosom of an intensified age.
From
Louis Untermeyer, “ China, Arabia, and Hester Street, ” rpm. 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 rubric verse form
is composed of a series of Imagistic etchings delineating incidents out of an Australian
babyhood. The address is genuinely
childlike, and the episode with Jude peculiarly traveling.
There are besides some grownup memoirs called “ Monologues. ” The best verse form in the book are the farther vocals
of rebellion: “ Sons of Belial ” and
“ Reveille. ” . . .
“ Red
Flag, ” issued two old ages ago, has a dual involvement: the entryway of Communist Russia
on the one manus and of traditional sonnets on the other. . . .The sonnets of Miss Ridge
are non the equal of her verse forms in free poetry. None
the less, despite an awkward handling of prosodies, her spirit pervades each verse form. Of the Russian verse form, “ Snow-Dance For The
Dead, ” is a delicate lament in which kids are invited to ripple like the snow
and to “ dance beneath the Kremlin towers ” for soldiers fallen in the Red
Revolution. If Lola Ridge should of all time decease,
Russia ought to honour her at the side of Jack Reed. So
should Ireland, Australia, America, and every other land in whose bosom freedom is more
than an raddled 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 history 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 footing of Russian film maker
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 ] devotedness was one that
can be described merely in footings of a saintliness that Paul Vincent Carroll in his 1
felicitous drama, Shadow and Substance, gave to his memorable and vision-haunted
Irish heroine. Those who remember Lola Ridge
besides retrieve the big, hardly furnished, wind-swept, cold-water loft where she lived in
downtown Manhattan. The loft was verylike
some neatly, frugally kept cold-water level in Dublin, and the unworldy presence of Lola
Ridge, a slender, tall, softly-speaking, thin-featured adult female in a dark frock, heightened
the semblance of being in a topographic point that was non New York, but was good in sight of Dublin & # 8217 ; s
purple hills. Even as one rereads her books
one additions the feeling that she regarded her societal strong beliefs and the authorship of
poesy in the same spirit in which an Irish miss invokes the will of God by come ining a
convent & # 8211 ; but Lola Ridge & # 8217 ; s devotedness had turned to self-taught and Protestant demands, and
the undertaking, the about impossible undertaking, of doing societal and spiritual emotion a incorporate
being was an attempt that remained unfinished at her decease.
. . .
In Dance
of Fire Lola Ridge & # 8217 ; s poetic adulthood
began, and it was apparent that in the sonnet sequence, “ Via Ignis, ” which opened
her last volume, Hart Crane & # 8217 ; s resurgence of Christopher Marlowe & # 8217 ; s enunciation left its feeling
upon her imaginativeness. The verse forms were written
at a clip when many of those who had read Hart Crane & # 8217 ; s The Bridge felt the
implied force of Crane & # 8217 ; s improvisations in antediluvian enunciation. . . .
Yet
despite their self-respect and possibly because of the high, disinterested motivations of their
composing, the sonnets remained discorporate and oddly abstract. It was as though the poet had become cognizant of her
lyrical gifts excessively tardily to happen the words with which to show them clearly ; felicitous
lines and phrases flowed through the sequence of 28 sonnets, and it is
impossible to reread them without regard for the saintly, unworldy motivations that seem to
hold inspired the interlacing subjects of “ Via Ignis. ” . . . Her moral bravery and
her inventive penetrations seem to hold reached beyond her strength, and if her devotedness to
poesy and the defeats of the hapless fell short of achievement in the authorship of a
entirely memorable verse form, her failure was an honest one.
For the literary historiographer her poetry provides a agency of demoing that the
younger authors of the 1930 & # 8217 ; s [ sic ] were non the first to rediscover the ghettos of New
York in a metropolis that was all excessively evidently sick at easiness between two wars. And few of those who followed the way she
had taken wrote from the altruistic 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
besides Hart Crane ]
