Lola Ridge as Agitprop Modernist

     I have elsewhere argued that aesthetic judgments are entirely independent of moral values or other thematic considerations. Were we to eschew books written by those who believed in slavery, we would lose Plato. If Roman Catholicism were deemed a superstition occluding any clear view of the world, Dante must be discarded. If sexism, racism, or class prejudice made an author unreadable, the library shelves would hold very little.
     This conviction, which I believe I share with Marx and Engels, has estranged me from writers with whom I carry protest signs, but who think the correct political line an enhancement to a work of literature and its absence a disqualifying failing. Such assumptions are to me little different from the philistine notion that authors thought to be free-living can produce nothing of worth, while those with exemplary lives are likely to produce exemplary work. How silly.
     The historical fact remains that McCarthyism and its predecessors and followers not only handicapped American society to the extent that we still lag behind all other developed nations in most measures of social welfare, it also led to the elimination of dozens of writers worth reading. In fact as artists writers identified with the left need have little else in common. Perhaps the most apparent division is that between those who identified with Modernism with its frequent fragmentation and obscurity and those who aimed at a fully proletarian art, immediately clear to the uneducated as a catalyst for social change. Since the leftist intellectuals of the era were such a heterogeneous lot, few aesthetic generalizations about the movement are possible.
     Lola Ridge is among those whose reputations diminished almost to the vanishing point before enjoying renewed attention in recent years. Her prominence in both avant-garde literary circles and in the radical socialist movement is evident from her associations with periodicals. She published in Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth and served as poetry editor for the revolutionary journal The New Masses. She published in Alfred Kreymborg’s Others and edited Harold Loeb’s Broom, but also appeared in and edited major magazines such as Poetry, New Republic, and The Saturday Review of Literature. She embraced poverty even after achieving considerable celebrity. Rexroth’s line in “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is the simple truth: “Lola Ridge alone/ In an icy furnished room.” By 1999 a critic could describe her as “now forgotten,” [1] yet at the time of her death in 1941, she was celebrated by the New York Times and Publishers Weekly as one of the country’s most important poets.
     Much recent comment on Ridge has focused first on the decline of her reputation. While her revival is well-deserved, it seems that much of the rebirth of interest in her work in the last few decades is inspired by the same non-aesthetic criteria often blamed for her eclipse; that is, her radical themes and her gender.
     She attempted to combine her straightforward commitment to left-wing causes, arising from her own unimpeachably proletarian life experience, with the tenets of the artistic experimenters of her day whop dealt in Imagism, fragmentation, indirection, and ambiguity. How these two elements combine, how impressively they collide or harmonize is likely to determine the reader’s reaction to Ridge’s oeuvre. The polarity emerges as early as Ridge’s breakthrough publication, “The Ghetto.”
     The first section of “The Ghetto” includes a line that echoes Pound’s celebrated “In a Station of the Métro,” which had been published five years earlier comparing the faces of passers-by to fallen flower petals. Ridge writes “Herring-yellow faces, spotted as with a mold, / And moist faces of girls/ Like dank white lilies.” The Lower East Side residents are beautiful like flowers yet afflicted with mold. The force hostile to their lives is then figured as oppressive heat “like a great beast.” The heat in Hester Street, “Heaped like a dray/ With the garbage of the world.” The apparently helpless distress of Hester Street resembles (and includes) “infants' faces with open parched mouths that suck at the air as at empty teats.” In its fragmentary, associative technique the poem was aesthetically au courant in 1916, the year of its publication.
     In the following image, however, the agitprop themes take priority. The “young women” moving about the neighborhood are, it seems, all attending “forums and meeting halls,” presumably organizing to end capitalism. In this aspect they overcome the monster of their circumstances represented by heat and become themselves “surging” and “indomitable.” They are suddenly unburdened, “their heads are uncovered to the stars,” calling out “with a free camaraderie,” as though they had never suffered. While these terms certainly may describe the attitude of a worker who has realized the basis for exploitation, they are less likely to characterize an entire neighborhood. Can this newfound self-consciousness render the immigrants unconquerable and free-spirited?
     In the mythic role of “the people” or “the masses” “their eyes are ancient and alone.” They are a timeless presence, enduring everything as Ma Joad says of “the people” in her famous speech in Grapes of Wrath: “But we keep a-comin’. We’re the people that live. Can’t nobody wipe us out. Can’t nobody lick us.” Thus the working class gains in theory a positive prognosis that may or may not obtain in history, even if soi-disant scientific socialists think the development from capitalism to socialism is inevitable. Failing to fall in line may gain an individual the title of “defeatist.” [2] The reader may suspect that Ridge has strayed from impressionist Imagism into a tendentious program.
     The next section (II) describes the persona’s room sublet from a working class family in the most specific and personal terms. Though unmentioned, the larger strictures of American capitalism remain always in the background. She observes the piety of the senior Sodos with sympathy but not unanimity. To her Mr. Sodos’ devotions amount to nothing more than “a broken whinnying/ Before the Lord's shut gate.” The persona’s sympathies lie instead with Sadie whom she calls “pagan” and presumably others of the younger generation among whom it was not uncommon to abandon their parents’ Old World traditions. [3]
     She may be inherently something of a free spirit, but Sadie’s life is nonetheless dominated by her work in a sweatshop where “all day the power machines/ Drone in her ears” and “all day the fine dust flies.” Her misery reanimates the heat monster which “like a kept corpse - /Fouls to the last corner.” She has twice been injured “to the bone,” and must caution her fellow-workers not to be too productive for fear of “again” being cut in hours or pay. She is, in fact, an exemplary radical, educating herself with “those books that have most unset thought,” and speaking at protest meetings, “her lit eyes kindling the mob.”
     Ridge was, however, no Stalinist, but instead an anarchist, an associate of Emma Goldman whom she applauded as a “mountain” and an organizer for the Ferrer Association. [4] Her heroine Sadie is also something of a bohemian, dancing “madly” at festivals and welcoming a “Gentile lover, that she charms and shrews” at whom her mother casts “narrowed eyes.” Sadie’s reading is perhaps overmatched by her upstairs neighbor Anna whose “mind is hard and brilliant and cutting like an acetylene torch,” though she works “in a pants factory.” She reads “psychology, plays, science, philosophies,” though only just studying English. This remarkable woman defies gender expectations, neglecting her appearance, she “covets nothing” and “would share all things/ Even a lover.”
     Though the working-class movement was substantial and genuinely radical in Ridge’s day, the number of believers in free love was miniscule. Here again the idealized picture of the dawning of revolutionary consciousness among the poor ill-fits the uncompromising realism of the setting, constructed of such details as “the keen draught blowing up the empty hall” and through the transom.
     In the third section the sharply observed details of tenement life are foregrounded with only the most discreet hint of the imagined glory of a socialist potential. “The sturdy Ghetto children” are happily waving flags at a patriotic parade. They possess considerable élan vital, “prancing,” “lusty,” the promise of the rising generation. As though in proud if unconscious Promethean rebellion, they shake “little fire sticks” at the night, “unafraid.” In contrast to these figures of hope Ridge embodies the effects of generations of oppression by capitalists and anti-Semites in “a small girl” who “cowers apart.” Confused and afraid, she is unable to appreciate the gift of an orange. Her eyes have the glow/ Of darkened lights.” Anxious rather than excited by the occasion, she dashes off to take refuge in the night, afraid. Her eyes are bright but shrouded, “like hooded lights” “out of the shadow of pogroms.” Though it is likely to be the observer, not the child, who recalls of the persecutions of the Old World, the cowed look of the underclass is authentically drawn.
     The fourth section again reproduces the pattern. The first section is a rich catalogue celebrating the lives of the immigrants as a lovely “tapestry” (though a “motley” one) or a pattern “in stained glass” (albeit “shivered”). “All the colors out to play,/ Jumbled iridescently...” The chaos clearly possesses a kind of beauty.


Calicoes and furs,
Pocket-books and scarfs,
Razor strops and knives


Ridge’s list turns from pickles to ornaments: beads, ribbons, and feathers, indicating the people’s joie de vivre, and then to an even more emphatically positive image: a vision of babies with their mothers “making all things right.” With all the crowds and activity Grand street is “like a great bazaar,” resembling also a decorated parade float or a “crazy quilt/ Stretched on a line.” Each of these suggests a joyful affirmation of life in its intoxicating diversity.
     However, Ridge follows these images of hope and fecundity with a turn toward darker notes beginning with the word “but.” She proceeds in stages.


But nearer seen
This litter of the East
Takes on a garbled majesty.


The word “but” signals the poet’s alteration of tone. “Majesty” remains, but it is now “garbled.” The phrase “litter of the East,” while suggesting Eastern European origins, poverty, and crowding, might have come directly from nativist propaganda. The market stalls display “glitter and the jumbled finery” in an ambiguous “dissolute array,” but they also suggest something “faded” and “decomposing.”


The richest image marks another transition.
Like an ancient tapestry of motley weave
Upon the open wall of this new land.


     The people’s beauty is implied by the word “tapestry” but the qualification “motley,” economically indicates their heterogeneous character and suggesting (for instance in the phrase “motley crew”) their penury. Their appearance here is accidental; they have been “flung” to survive as best they can. Though stemming from “ancient” cultures, they are in a new and unpredictable context.
     The contrast is illustrated by the following portrait.


Here, a tawny-headed girl...
Lemons in a greenish broth
And a huge earthen bowl
By a bronzed merchant
With a tall black lamb's wool cap upon his head...


     These sharp distinct images, it emerges, serve the same bipolar opposition that has run throughout the poem. The young “tawny-haired” woman has little in common with the swarthy merchant whose mind is fixed on business alone. (In fact, he resembles anti-Semitic stereotypes.) The older generation is also represented by another stall-holder, a pious and scholarly man who is mocked by the younger Jews as well as being roughly ousted by the police. He is, however, a “rock,” due to his faith in “the wisdom of the Talmud.” He is another timeless or “ancient” figure.
     By contrast a “young trader,” less of a traditionalist, seems a precursor of modern marketing as he sells “the notions of the hour,” rather like a television pitchman. This man dreams of building a skyscraper, an accomplishment doubtless achieved by more than one man who started as a pushcart vendor.
     In the sixth section the persona in her “little fifth-floor room” sees the stained walls and cockroaches of her shabby quarters. Her neighbors are weak and poor and often ailing. They are described here with adjectives such as “stooped,” “futile,” and “slack.” Even the parrot is “frowsy,” but it repeatedly calls out the word “Vorwärts!” reminding the reader that out of squalor liberation may emerge. Vorwärts, meaning “forward” in both Yiddish and German might signify progress in general, but it is here specific to the economic struggle. The word was most familiar to Ridge’s readers as the name of the popular Yiddish socialist daily, a journal that survives today. The Forward was a neighborhood institution, founded in Walhalla Hall just around the corner from Hester on Orchard Street.
     The fires of life and potential rebellion within still burn, their persistence signified by lighting Shabbat candles, in Yiddish called licht bentschen or "light praying" or licht tsinden, "light kindling.” The ritual meaning of their fires is displaced in section VII in which a fiery revolutionary spirit becomes explicit in a depiction of a clandestine anarchist meeting. In this gathering of the most collective of theorists she finds instead “egos out of the shell,” trying to prevail against each other with words, practicing with pride if imperfectly their new-found intellectual skills in debates with each other. [5] They may seem unlikely intellectuals, these “little squat tailors with unkempt faces,” In a partial rationalization of individualist/collective conundrum one “garbles,” Max Stirner, the anarchist of egoism who thought no imperative exists except the pursuit of self-interest. Here men (and a few women) charge ever forward; the only ancient element is their suffering, the “world-old want in their eyes.” Their absurdities are understandable as they are “yet in the primer” and their leader a mere “lank boy with hair over his eyes.” Yet they follow a glorious vision.


The great white Liberty,
Trailing her dissolving glory over each hard-won barricade -
Only to fade anew...


     For this reason their efforts in this “secret meeting in this shut-in room” are blessed and the room’s emptiness, which at first resembled a “barn” is now “bare as a manger,” recalling Christ’s poverty.
     In spite of this conflation of the political and the religious, this seems more a sketch from life than an intrusion of vulgar “socialist realism.” The radicals are portrayed without unrealistic idealization. Their self-contradictions and their absurdity are clear. Here Ridge’s Imagist practice again prevails over the reductive temptations of a political line.
     In Part VIII she situates the entire scene in “cramped ova” where once again the opposition arises between the world’s harshness with its “travails, immolations, cataclysms, hates,” and the beautiful babies “like little potted flowers.” The men’s eyes may be “heavy and dimmed,” but they retain a vision of the moon “lolling on the coverlet... like a woman offering her white body.” The same sensual moon is meanwhile making the nipples of the young girls “tingle and burn.” Eros, it seems is the dynamo that powers these “young lovers” and not an end to exploitation. They can hear life “calling its new Christs” “like a word molten out of the mouth of God.”
     A lovely phantasmagoria descends with the night and a delicate loveliness descends over the ghetto.


Lights go out...
And colors rush together,
Fusing and floating away...
Pale worn gold like the settings of old jewels...
Mauves, exquisite, tremulous, and luminous purples
And burning spires in aureoles of light
Like shimmering auras.


     Part IX continues the affirmative celebration of the life of the street and of life in general without entailing a specific political end. The viewpoint returns to its center, the tenement room occupied by the persona. The delicate beauty of the scene is now paramount.


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.


     Again Hester Street is characterized as a woman, though suffering has not vanished as a subtext; the neighborhood is “a forlorn woman over-born.” “The Ghetto” concludes with a paean to “LIFE!,” with Ridge’s emphatic capitalization and exclamation point. Likely influence by Bergsons’s élan vital. Here “the black and clotted gutters” are simply another detail like the “Sweet staccato/ Of children's laughter.” The spectacle of commerce is from this perspective a musical interchange of energies. The replacement of the old with the new seems a part of the great symphony of reality.
     The poem ends with the incorporation of suffering (“bloody,” “bitter”) into this majestic and beautiful depiction, including an explicit reference to Christ’s Passion implying that the redemptive trials of the workers will yet result in their redemption.

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.


     “The Ghetto” is built on a number of bipolar oppositions, set against one another in swinging Whitmanic lines. Thematically the most important is the old and the new, a natural reflection of the immigrant experience. This appears as the contrast between religious faith and secularism, with its choice of individualistic commerce and collective struggle. In association with these themes, significant image systems play off moist against fiery and dark against light. Surely the opposition between those who believe they glimpse the possibility of a better life and those focused on improving their lot under present conditions is as legitimate and workable a structural element as these (or others such as male/female or hot/cold that play a role in the poem).
     There can be no doubt that the contrast of the revolutionary with the traditional was a prominent part of Hester Street life in the early twentieth century. It is difficult to realize now that there were at the time of the publication of “The Ghetto” and for thirty years thereafter neighborhoods in which communism and anarchism were commonplace. “It was life, the only life I ever knew, and it was alive. Intense, absorbing, filled with a kind of comradeship I never again expect to know…. We literally felt we were making history.” [6] Though Ridge may strike current readers as falsely including the question of revolution among the daily concerns of New Yorkers, this is due to historical short-sightedness.
     Art excels at ambiguity, mystery, and paradox whereas political commitment must for tactical reasons suppress ambivalence and uncertainty. For this reason tendentious works can be reductive. In Ridge, though, the poetry leads. Her lyrically beautiful images are the most prominent feature of her text. She is faithful to her impression of experience, with only an occasional hyperbole suggesting special pleading. Her anarchist notion of the possibility of human freedom serves a spiritual as well as an economic end. Revolution is in fact only a part of a larger opposition between the old and the new that oscillates in the Lower East Side ghetto in harmonic association with other tensions. If readers do not fault Aristophanes or Dante for detailing the struggles of their own times , making no secret of their own partisan positions, they need not shrink from Americans whose causes seem to them passé . Those to whom anarchists seem silly or Communists wicked as well as those who wish their art to conform to one ideology or another have a good deal in common. Those concerned with poetry will be content with the rhythms and the images.





1. Nancy Berke, “Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in Lola Ridge's ‘The Ghetto,’" Vol. 16, No. 1, Discourses of Women and Class (1999), pp. 70-81. Revaluations include Terese Svoboda’s biography Anything that Burns You and Louise Bernikow’s discussion in A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry.

2. I myself was so labeled by a militant organization many years ago, though I thought my own analysis as radical as theirs.

3. In the decade to follow, this sort of generational conflict became the theme of popular works such as Abie’s Irish Rose and The Jazz Singer.

4. The phrase appears n her poem titled “Emma Goldman.” The association between radicalism and looser morality is by no means constant outside of anarchism. Vivian Gornick recalls her parents advising her to date only Communist boys as they would more predictably treat her with “respect.”

5. The American left has often repeated the story of factions turning on others, more easily defeatable than the ruling class, with whom they might better form a popular front. In this it resembles the splits of religious sects.

6. Paul Levinson, quoted in Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism.