The Ghetto, and Other Poems - by Lola Ridge (Paperback)

About the Book

At last recovered in this enriching annotated edition, this important but neglected work of American modernism offers a unique poetic encounter with the Jewish communities in New York's Lower East Side.

Book Synopsis

At last recovered in this enriching annotated edition, this important but neglected work of American modernism offers a unique poetic encounter with the Jewish communities in New York's Lower East Side.

Long forgotten on account of her gender and left-wing politics, Lola Ridge is finally being rediscovered and read alongside such celebrated contemporaries as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore--all of whom knew her and admired her work. In her time Ridge was considered one of America's leading poets, but after her death in 1941 she and her work effectively disappeared for the next seventy-five years. Her book The Ghetto and Other Poems, is a key work of American modernism, yet it has long, and unjustly, been neglected. When it was first published in 1918--in an abbreviated version in The New Republic, then in full by B. W. Huebsch five months later--The Ghetto and Other Poems was a literary sensation. The poet Alfred Kreymbourg, in a Poetry Magazine review, praised "The Ghetto" for its "sheer passion, deadly accuracy of versatile images, beauty, richness, and incisiveness of epithet, unfolding of adventures, portraiture of emotion and thought, pageantry of pushcarts--the whole lifting, falling, stumbling, mounting to a broad, symphonic rhythm." Louis Untermeyer, writing in The New York Evening Post, found "The Ghetto" "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."

The long title poem is a detailed and sympathetic account of life in the Jewish Ghetto of New York's Lower East Side, with particular emphasis on the struggles and resilience of women. The subsequent section, "Manhattan Lights," delves further into city life and immigrant experience, illuminating life in the Bowery. Other poems stem from Ridge's lifelong support of the American labor movement, and from her own experience as an immigrant. This critical edition seeks to recover the attention The Ghetto, and Other Poems, and in particular the title poem, lost after Ridge's death. The poems in the volume are as aesthetically strong as they are historically revealing. Their language combines strength and directness with startling metaphors, and their form embraces both panoramic sweep and lyrical intensity.

Expertly edited and annotated by Lawrence Kramer, this first modern edition to reproduce the full 1918 publication of The Ghetto and Other Stories offers all the background and context needed for a rich, informed reading of Lola Ridge's masterpiece.

From the Back Cover

"A terrific poet, in both senses of the word. . . . Like Blake, she can evoke innocence and experience in a way that blurs the ambiguous boundary between them."--Robert Pinsky

"This edition, aided by reader-friendly notes, will bring significant attention to these important poems and Ridge's world."--Susan Stewart

At last recovered in this enriching annotated edition, this important but neglected work of American modernism offers a unique poetic encounter with the Jewish communities in New York's Lower East Side.

Long forgotten on account of her gender and left-wing politics, Lola Ridge is finally being rediscovered and read alongside such celebrated contemporaries as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore--all of whom knew her and admired her work. In her time Ridge was considered one of America's leading poets, but after her death in 1941 she and her work effectively disappeared for the next seventy-five years. Yet The Ghetto and Other Poems is a key work of American modernism.

The long title poem is a detailed and sympathetic account of life in the Jewish Ghetto of New York's Lower East Side, with particular emphasis on the struggles and resilience of women. Subsequent sections delve further into city life, and immigrant experience, and the labor movement. This critical edition seeks to recover the attention The Ghetto, and Other Poems lost after Ridge's death. The poems in the volume are as aesthetically strong as they are historically revealing. Their language combines strength and directness with startling metaphors, and their form embraces both panoramic sweep and lyrical intensity.

Lola Ridge (1873, Dublin-1941, Brooklyn) was a poet and editor active in many radical causes and in avant-garde literary circles in New York in the decades between the world wars.

Lawrence Kramer is Distinguished Professor of English and Music at Fordham University.

Review Quotes

"This edition, aided by reader-friendly notes, will bring significant attention to these important poems and Ridge's world."---Susan Stewart

"'The Ghetto' is representative of the best of . . . Ridge's endowments. In some aspects, it is like a miniature Comedie humaine, with the dominant note of sadness that runs through Balzac's narratives so insistently."---Hart Crane

"A terrific poet, in both senses of the word. . . . It's necessary to . . . appreciate the magnitude and freshness of her enterprise: to make poetry out of the actual city. . . . Like Blake, she can evoke innocence and experience in a way that blurs the ambiguous boundary between them."---Robert Pinsky

About the Author

Lola Ridge (Author)
Lola Ridge (1873, Dublin-1941, Brooklyn) was a poet and editor active in many radical causes and in avant-garde literary circles in New York in the decades before the world wars. She published five volumes of poetry between 1918 and 1935 and served as an editor at two leading modernist journals, The Broom and Others. Two (unannotated) collections of her early poetry have been published in recent years, edited by Daniel Tobin.

Lawrence Kramer (Edited By)
Lawrence Kramer is Distinguished Professor of English and Music at Fordham University. He is the author of fifteen books, as well as editor of two previous annotated editions of poetry: Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition (NYRB, 2015) and Hart Crane's 'The Bridge' An Annotated Edition (Fordham, 2011).