Full Description
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.
Contents
Introduction xi
The Ghetto
To the American People 3
The Ghetto 5
Manhattan Lights
Manhattan 35
Broadway 37
Flotsam 39
Spring 43
Bowery Afternoon 45
Promenade 46
The Fog 48
Faces 49
Labor
Debris 55
Dedication 56
The Song of Iron 57
Frank Little at Calvary 63
Spires 68
The Legion of Iron 69
Fuel 71
A Toast 72
Accidentals
"The Everlasting Return" 77
Palestine 81
The Song 82
To the Others 83
Babel 84
The Fiddler 85
Dawn Wind 86
North Wind 88
The Destroyer 89
Lullaby 90
The Foundling 92
The Woman with Jewels 93
Submerged 95
Art and Life 96
Brooklyn Bridge 97
Dreams 98
The Fire 99
A Memory 100
The Edge 101
The Garden 103
Under-Song 105
A Worn Rose 107
Iron Wine 108
Dispossessed 109
The Star 111
The Tidings 112
Appendix: The New Republic Version of "The Ghetto" 115
References 133
