Bare,
Save for bed and chair,
And coppery stains
Left by seeping rains
On the low ceiling
And green plaster walls,
Where when night falls
Golden lady-bugs
Come out of their holes,
And roaches, sepia-brown, consort… (Ghetto 20)
The father, an old saddlemaker, dovens: “I hear his lifted praise,/Like a broken whinnying/Before the Lord’s shut gate.” His young wife is making a new and more secular life for herself without wearing the traditional wig. The daughter, Sadie, a pieceworker, twice injured to the bone by her sewing machine, reads radical politics by night and entertains a Gentile lover. Two young women live above them, Sarah whose “mind is hard and brilliant and cutting”—an idealist who works in a pants factory (the speaker finds this “droll”) and Anna with “the appeal of a folk-song.” A parrot screams “Vorwaerts…Vorwaerts” across the courtyard, the name of the most popular radical newspaper in Europe. Translated from German and Yiddish, vorwaerts means “forward.” Headquarters for the Yiddish newspaper “The Forward” was located only a few blocks from Hester Street. The speaker of “The Ghetto” observes the parade of immigrant life below her fifth-floor window, the buying and selling, the courting, and the children adapting to their new lives:
The sturdy Ghetto children
March by the parade,
Waving their toy flags,
Prancing to the bugles,
Lusty, unafraid.
But I see a white frock
And eyes like hooded lights
Out of the shadow of pogroms
Watching…watching… (Ghetto 15)
Part of the power of the poem is not only due to Ridge’s perspective of faraway New Zealand bush towns but also from the small towns in the U.S. where she must have lived during its composition. As Raymond Williams points out in his Politics of Modernism: “The most important general element of the innovations in [modernist] form is the fact of immigration to the metropolis, and it cannot too often be emphasized how many of the major innovators were, in this precise sense, immigrants.”
“Let anything that burns you come out whether it be propaganda or not,” Ridge told an interviewer in the 1930s when writing poems about politics was especially prevalent. It was Ridge’s gift to feel so deeply about the situation in America, and a stance she would not relinquish. The trick was to transcend propaganda, and that she learned from Shelley.
England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field;
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
Ridge loved Shelley’s work, as did quite a number of her contemporaries. Fellow poet Elinor Wylie wrote many essays, four novels, and two books of poetry about him—and swore she actually saw his ghost. Novelist Evelyn Scott packed a volume of Shelley’s poetry as one of the six books she took with her when she ran off with someone else’s husband to Brazil. Like Ridge, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote many sonnets after Shelley—not Shakespeare—in particular, her homage to geometry, “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.” Oscar Wilde, Karl Marx, George Bernard Shaw, and Upton Sinclair loved Shelley too, for his uncompromising idealism and for his enthusiastic practice of free love (two ménages à trois, a ménage à quatre, and various communal endeavors). Shelley also publicly sympathized with the Irish. “The Tidings,” the last poem in Ridge’s book, pays homage to her ancient forebears with a poem about the Irish Easter Rebellion in 1916.
My heart is like a lover foiled
By a broken stair—
They are fighting to-night in Sackville Street,
And I am not there! (Ghetto 79)
An even greater influence on Ridge is Whitman. All the modernists embraced the freeness of his style, even Eurocentric Ezra Pound who wrote “A Pact” with him, declaring him “the best America has produced.” Ridge retained Whitman’s headlong and expansive line, sharing with Whitman the second enormous wave of immigration that engulfed New York decades after he witnessed the first. Ridge particularized the multitudes that Whitman “contained.”
They are covering up the pushcarts…
Now all have gone save an old man with mirrors—
Little oval mirrors like tiny pools.
He shuffles up a darkened street
And the moon burnishes his mirrors till they shine like phosphorus…
The moon like a skull,
Staring out of eyeless sockets at the old men trundling home the pushcarts. (Ghetto 27-28)
And she includes the sex:
Nude glory of the moon!
That leaps like an athlete on the bosoms of the young girls stripped of their linens;
Stroking their breasts that are smooth and cool as mother-of-pearl
Till the nipples tingle and burn as though those little lips plucked at them.
They shudder and go faint. (Ghetto 26-27)
Whitman’s appeal to radicals runs deep. He liberated poetry with his unrhymed, ragged lines, he sang freely of the body, he wrote about the workman and his troubles, he entreated the American youth to “resist much, obey little.” He showed the way in poetry 50 years earlier, about the same time bohemianism and its anarchical view on life began to take hold in Australia. “Bohemia comes but once in one’s life. Let’s treasure even its memory,” he exclaimed, recalling the many hours he spent at Pfaff’s beer cellar at the table of “The King of Bohemia” Henry Clapp, Jr, who “nursed controversies and kept Whitman in the public eye as a radical new voice” during a low point in Whitman’s career. Clapp also frequently published Whitman in his Saturday Press, a countercultural answer to the Atlantic Monthly that featured poetry, stories, and radical politics with an enthusiastic spirit of individual freedom and sexual openness. Whitman was grateful, and promulgated this spirit in his poetry, which continued to gain adherents by the year. “Not songs of loyalty alone are these,” he writes, “But songs of insurrection also,/For I am the sworn/poet of every dauntless rebel, the world over.” There were consequences, however. In 1897 three editors of The Firebrand were tried and convicted by Anthony Comstock’s laws for sending Whitman’s “A Woman Waits for me” through the mails, and one of them, aged 74, served four months in prison.
In a 1907 New York Times article announcing the translation of Leaves of Grass into Russian, Whitman is referred to as the “Poet-Anarchist.” By the time the Ferrer Center was in operation in 1910, the radicals there revered him as a comrade, “uncouth, elemental, Anarchistic.” Manuel Komroff and Ferrer organizer William Thurston Brown wrote pamphlets about Whitman’s work, Voltairine de Cleyre called him a “supremely Anarchist” writer. Emma Goldman and other devotees discussed his work at the Hotel Brevoort once a year. Theodore Dreiser delivered a speech at the Center about Whitman. Whitman’s literary executor Horace Traubel, who published nine volumes of his conversations with Whitman in his old age, contributed to The Modern School magazine. Sadakichi Hartmann, one of the more flamboyant Center characters, lunched with Whitman, discussing literature and art. Half Japanese, Hartmann freed genre with Whitman-like flourishes, putting on finger dances, shadow pictures, perfume concerts, and pantomimes, as well as being one of the best critics of photography in America, and the first to write haiku in English.
Louis Untermeyer’s review of The Ghetto and Other Poems mentions Ridge’s little-known contemporary Arturo Giovannitti (1884-1959) as a rival. Published five years earlier, Giovannitti’s Arrows in the Gale also uses Whitman’s proselike line to very similar advantage, but where Ridge declaimed the integrity of those in the ghetto, he did so for the striker. Educated at McGill and Columbia, Giovannitti became an ordained minister, but was later radicalized by his work in the coal mines. A fearsome orator, he spoke four languages fluently, and the authorities wanted him kept quiet. Falsely accused of starting a riot during the Lawrence mill strike, he spent ten months in jail fearing the death penalty, where he composed his best poetry, conflating Christian beliefs with proletarian morality. The following is an excerpt from his poem “The Walker.”
I have heard the moans of him who bewails a thing that is dead and the sighs of him who tries to smother a thing that will not die;
I have heard the stifled sobs of the one who weeps with his head under the coarse blanket, and the whisperings of the one who prays with his forehead on the hard, cold stone of the floor;
I have heard him who laughs the shrill, sinister laugh of folly at the horror rampant on the yellow wall and at the red eyes of the nightmare glaring through the iron bars;
I have heard in the sudden icy silence him who coughs a dry, ringing cough, and wished madly that his throat would not rattle so and that he would not spit on the floor, for no sound was more atrocious than that of his sputum upon the floor;
I have heard him who swears fearsome oaths which I listen to in reverence and awe, for they are holier than the virgin’s prayer,
And I have heard, most terrible of all, the silence of two hundred brains all possessed by one single, relentless, unforgiving, desperate thought.
Arrows in the Gale was introduced by Helen Keller, then deeply interested in socialist causes. She wrote: “Giovannitti is, like Shelley, a poet of revolt against the cruelty, the poverty, the ignorance which too many of us accept.” Workers paid to have Giovannitti’s book read to them while they slaved away in sweatshops. He resembled Pound in his youth, with a Van Dyck beard, flowing tie and Lord Byron collar, but his situation was the very opposite of Pound’s so many years later. While Pound was tried for broadcasting treasonous speeches against America from Italy, the Italian Giovannitti was tried for inciting immigrants in America. But, like Pound, he spent weeks in a cage, incarcerated during his trial in 1912.
The Cage
All was old, and cold and mournful…
and their faces were drawn and white and lifeless…
For of naught they knew, but of what was written in the old, yellow books. And all the joys and the pains and the loves and hatreds and furies and labors and strifes of man, all the fierce and divine passions that battle and rage in the heart of man, never entered into the great greenish room but to sit in the green iron cage.
His prosecutors rightly feared his ability with rhetoric—he gave such a stirring defense of himself that he was acquitted.
But I say that you cannot be half free and half slave…the man that owns the tool wherewith another man works, the man that owns the house where this man lives, the man that owns the factory… that man owns and controls the bread that man eats and therefore owns and controls his mind, his body, his heart and his soul…it may be that we are fanatics…we are fanatics…And so was a fanatic the Saviour Jesus Christ.
Giovannitti’s particular contribution to modernism was in pressing Whitman’s long lines toward the construction of the modern prose poem. Like Ridge, his ellipses—sometimes known as “suspension periods”—signal a bigger pause than a comma, rather than indicating something left out. Like Ridge, he too wrote a poem commemorating the lynching of labor activist Frank Little, his called “When the Cock Crows,” and both invoke Christian ideology. As soon as Giovannitti was acquitted in 1913, he visited the Ferrer Center but by that time Ridge had already begun her travels.
A young wunderkind poet of Ridge’s time, Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976), wrote about the Jewish ghetto of his childhood in Brooklyn, using very plain, long prosy lines like Ridge.
The shopgirls leave their work
quietly.
Machines are still, tables and chairs
darken.
The silent rounds of mice and roaches begin.
Unlike Ridge, Reznikoff shunned publication and avoided recognition. His family supported him for many years. Reviewing his work in the twenties, W.R.B. (most likely Ridge’s friend William Rose Benét) says that Reznikoff showed that “seared and disillusioned humanity which, rightly or not, we associate with the ghetto,” but complained that the poems often lack development: “Most poets do not know when to leave off; by contrast, Mr. Reznikoff does not know when to go on!” In the 1930s, Reznikoff, along with fellow Lower East Sider Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978), identified with objectivism, a movement derived from imagism that focused compressed lines on everyday life and language, emphasizing sincerity and clarity. In “Flotsam,” a two-part poem in free verse, Ridge depicts a couple on a bench in compressed, simple language that could be called proto-objectivist:
This old man’s head
Has found a woman’s shoulder.
The wind juggles with her shawl
That flaps about them like a sail,
And splashes her red faded hair
Over the salt stubble of his chin. (Ghetto 35)
The imagists were the first modernists in poetry. In 1909, while Ridge was showing her stories to Goldman, trying to make money publishing pot-boilers, Englishman T.E. Hulme originated the theories of imagism. Its maxims were concision, the isolation of a single image to reveal its essence, “a new cadence means a new idea,” and emphasis on a poetry that was hard and clear. Initially inspired by Japanese forms of haiku and tanka as a result of the craze for all things Asian, including Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado” and the poems by Ridge’s Modern School acquaintance Sadakichi Hartmann, imagism was soon taken up by Ezra Pound. In London at the time, he introduced imagism to his ex-flame H.D. and promoted her as a central figure in the movement. By March of 1913 Poetry had published imagism’s “A Few Don’ts” as elucidated by Pound. The next month Poetry ran his “In a Station of the Metro,” the defining poem of the movement. In 1914 Ridge’s soon-to-be colleague Alfred Kreymborg published Pound’s Des Imagistes in his literary magazine The Glebe, which included imagist work by other soon-to-be friends William Carlos Williams and Amy Lowell, as well as James Joyce and Ford Maddox Ford. In 1915, 1916, and 1917, Amy Lowell published three volumes of imagist verse in London. She had the financial means to take over the movement from Pound, who then mocked it, calling it “amygism.” She believed imagism to be derived from Keats. Short-lived in its purest state, imagism has had a long influence. Amy Lowell’s first tenet of the movement—“To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word”—could apply to the practice of most of the poets writing today.
Imagism often produced very condensed shorter poems, the inverse of Whitman’s long prosy lines; however, some of the inspiration may have come from Whitman too.
A Farm Picture
Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn,
A sun-lit pasture field with cattle and horses feeding,
And haze and vista, and the far horizon fading away.
Ridge abjured the imagist’s interest in the classical as subject matter. Perhaps she found Kreymborg’s hesitations about the movement apt: “[imagism] was too remote from our lives among the lonely streets and byways of this mysterious land…We craved a more direct cultural expression, however crude, hard and blundering.” As Untermeyer writes in his review: “In this poem [“The Ghetto”] Miss Ridge achieves a sharp line, the arresting and fixing of motion, the condensed clarity advertised by the imagists with far more human passion than they ever betrayed.” “The Ghetto” could be considered a long sequence o
f imagist poems, especially sections one through six where Ridge packs concise language into nearly every line, as specific as “And mothers take home their babies,/Waxen and delicately curled,/like little potted flowers closed under the stars.” or
But a small girl
Cowers apart.
Her braided head,
Shiny as a black-bird’s
In the gleam of the torch-light,
Is poised as for flight.
Her eyes have the glow
Of darkened lights. (Ghetto 14)
“The Ghetto” is also a poem of the flâneur. The speaker of the poem observes the parade of immigrant life below her fifth-floor window, and she also walks the streets of the city, seeing it up close. “Lemons in a greenish broth/And a huge earthen bowl/By a bronzed merchant…” As Whitman sauntered through Brooklyn 63 years earlier, Carl Sandburg celebrated immigrant labor in “Chicago Poems” four years earlier, and T.S. Eliot would bemoan the decay of London in “The Wasteland” four years later, Ridge saw the urban landscape in passing as a woman and an immigrant, an entirely new perspective. As critic Nancy Berke says: “[Ridge] records her reflections on a new life of art and freedom, as well as an understanding of the social dislocation created by the abrupt changes of “a new century” and “a new city.”
While Ridge was traveling and writing her first book, women burst onto the literary scene as writers and prominent editors. Harriet Monroe founded Poetry in 1912, Margaret Anderson began editing The Little Review in 1914, to be joined by her lover Jane Heap two years later, and Amy Lowell took over imagism with her three-volume anthology in 1917. In England, Dora Marsden edited the New Freewoman under the credo that “The intense satisfaction of self is for the individual the one goal in life.” The New Freewoman soon became the Egoist in 1914 under the direction of Harriet Shaw Weaver who published much modernist poetry. Ida Purnell edited Palms from Guadalajara. Forty percent of the poets published in Others were women, a number unequaled even today in most literary magazines. According to cultural critic Christine Stansell:
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