Chapter 12 - Accidental Irishness and the Transnational Legacy of Lola Ridge

Summary

Lola Ridge is an exemplary case of an overlooked Irish woman poet of major talent, whose life and career failed to follow a conventional path, and who is only now receiving her full critical due. Born in Dublin, Ridge lived in Australia and New Zealand before settling in the United States, where she was active in leftist politics. Previous critics of Ridge have seen her Irishness as accidental rather than essential, but this is to downplay the ways in which her Irishness interacts with transnational poetics in the modernist age. Her first book, The Ghetto, is a striking example of the urban modernist lyric, comparable to the work of Mina Loy and Muriel Rukeyser, while her broader links to Imagism and Objectivism are dynamic and, for an Irish poet of the time, remarkable. Sensitive portraits of working-class and immigrant-class life are a particular forte. Irish politics are also a felt presence, however, as in her third book Red Flag. Looking forward to Adrienne Rich as much as to Eavan Boland, Ridge is a poet very much of our time, and one who belongs at the centre of the modern Irish canon.