Lola Ridge, American Modernism’s Forgotten Radical

Terese Svoboda’s biography of Lola Ridge presents the poet as a central and overlooked node in the development of American modernism, through whom we can re-read its experimental, feminist, immigrant, cosmopolitan, and national formations. Raised in New Zealand, Ridge immigrated to the US as an adult and served as editor for the modernist magazines Broom and Others while developing into one of labor radicalism’s most prominent poetic voices. Svoboda contends that Ridge was among the pivotal figures of American modernism in the 1920s and 1930s—“as important to this period of American modernism as Pound was the European” (208)—whose salons sought to articulate and promote a distinctive, American modernist aesthetic. Anything that Burns You sketches an alternative vision of American modernism, read through Ridge’s biography, her indefatigable efforts as a literary networker, and her poetry.