Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  Critical research assistance was given by Dr. Francesca Galligan at the Bodleian, June Can at the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, Elizabeth Fuller at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Fernanda Perrone at Rutgers University, Nancy Stout at Fordham University, Sue Asplin and Julia Bradshaw at the Hokitika Museum. Of course I am in love with Interlibrary loan at the New York Public Library, the University of Hawaii, Columbia University, and the National Library of Australia.

  Archives and libraries that contributed material include: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Special Collections; Special Collections Department at Syracuse University; Columbia University Archives; Kislak Center for Special Collections Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania; Special Collections, University of California, Berkeley; Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives; Bancroft Library, Berkeley; Marianne Moore Collection, Rosenbach Museum and Library; Special Collections and Archives, Kent State University; Special Collections Bryn Mawr; Mt. Holyoke; Special Collections, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division; William Floyd Estate; Houghton Library, Harvard University; The Mitchell Dawson Papers, Library; Williams (William Carlos) Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo; John Simon Guggenheim Foundation; The Corporation of Yaddo; Hokitika Museum; University/Archives, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago Library; Manuscripts and Archive Division of the New York Public Library; Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia; Department of Rare Books; Mitchell Library at Sydney, Australia; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

  I would also like to thank critic Nancy Berke, Craig Howes, and poet Neil Shepherd for reading my first draft and providing important insights, Molly Giles and Laurie Stone for their patience with reading excerpts, the brilliant biographers Nancy Milford, Nancy Stout, and Nancy Schoenberger for professional tips, Dinah Lenney at the L.A. Review of Books, Ander Monson at Diagram, Scott Cheshire at The Scofield, and David Bonnano at American Poetry Review for publishing excerpts and essays, Clarence Coo at Columbia for extending my library privileges, Frank Brady for his candid recollection of David Lawson, Andre Bernard for locating the Guggenheim archive, Nancy Berke, Candace Falk, Suzanne Churchill, Linda Leavell, Carolyn Burke, Denise Scott-Fears, and Karen Avrich who shared their scholarship, Thomas Aiello at Valdosta State University who shared copies of documents from his work on David Lawson, National Park Service staffmember Denise Steinmacher at the William Floyd Estate for her guidance, archeologist Rick Hauser who told me what Gertrude Bell had for breakfast, Katherine Gibson, genius human geographer who oriented me in Sydney, the Australian scholars Susan Sheridan, Drusilla Modjeska, and Martin Edmond for answering my queries. Robert Polito for his early encouragement, Eleanor Wilner for her power, Janelle Cornwell for her fine hospitality and critical mind, Stevie Fitzgerald at the Authors Guild and Timothy J. DeBaets and his associate Jeffrey Lawhorn for legal advice, Steve Bull who not only read drafts but forced the computer to print them and held my hand when it crashed, my sons Felix and Frank who withheld judgment, and my dear publisher and once agent, Tim Schaffner, whose idea it was in the first place. To those I have forgotten, I quote Ridge: “My wonderful friends…in reality no one ever does anything alone.”

  Jill Quasha and The Estate of Marjorie Content were particularly generous with permitting me to use Content’s photograph for the cover. Executor Elaine Sproat gave me lists of Ridge’s publications and reviews. After Ridge’s death in 1941, Ridge’s papers were held by her husband, David Lawson who gave them to Elaine Sproat. She, in turn, deposited half of them at Smith College. I was denied permission to examine the remainder of the papers although copyright on all the material expired 2011. Lacking access to primary material, I am doubly grateful for the work of scholars whose writing on Ridge had been approved by Sproat.

  —Terese Svoboda

  November 2015

  Bibliography

  LETTERS/ARCHIVAL MATERIAL

  Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

  Crane, Hart. Letter to Lorna Dietz. Hart Crane Collection.

  Hemingway, Ernest. Letter to Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound Papers.

  Josephson, Matthew. Correspondence. Matthew Josephson Papers.

  Ridge, Lola. Letter to Alfred Stieglitz. Collection of American Literature.

  ---. Letter to Henry Seidel Canby. Henry Seidel Canby Papers.

  ---. Letters to Jean Toomer. Jean Toomer Papers.

  ---. Letter to Joseph H. Brewer. Joseph Brewer Papers.

  ---. Letters to Josephine Crane. Josephine Boardman Crane Papers.

  ---. Letter to Llewellyn Jones. Collection of American Literature.

  ---. Letter to Louise Morgan. Louise Morgan and Otto Theis Papers.

  ---. Letters to Marjorie Content. Marjorie Content Papers.

  ---. Letter to Otto Theis. Louise Morgan and Otto Theis Papers.

  ---. Letter to Rebecca Strand. Rebecca Salsbury James Papers.

  Sproat, Elaine. Letters to Carolyn Burke. Carolyn Burke Papers.

  Broom Correspondence of Harold Loeb, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.

  Josephson, Matthew. Letter to Gorham Munson.

  Loeb, Harold. Letters to Lola Ridge.

  Ridge, Lola. Letters to Harold Loeb.

  ---. Letter to Matthew Josephson.

  Columbia University Archives, Special Collections, New York, NY.

  Ridge, Lola. Letters to Harrison Smith.

  ---. Letter to Hart Crane. Hart Crane Papers.

  ---. Letters to Lenore Marshall. Lenore Marshall Papers.

  Smith, Hal. Letters to Lola Ridge.

  John Simon Guggenheim Fund, New York.

  Guggenheim application. 1935.

  Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

  Ridge, Lola. Letters to Evelyn Scott. Evelyn Scott Collection.

  ---. Letter to Idella Purnell. Idella Purnell Stone Personal Papers.

  Scott, Creighton. Unpublished Mss.

  Hokitika Museum, Hokitika, NZ.

  Sproat, Elaine. Letter to J. Engles.

  Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

  Bynner, Witter. Letter to Lola Ridge. Witter Bynner Papers.

  Cummings, E.E. Letter to Lola Ridge. E. E. Cummings Additional Papers.

  Ridge, Lola. Letter to Rose Freeman-Ishill. Joseph Ishill Correspondence.

  Jeannette Augustus Marks Papers. Mt. Holyoke College, Special Collections, South Hadley, MA.

  Marks, Jeannette. Letter to Lola Ridge.

  Ridge, Lola. Letters to Jeannette Marks.

  Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS.

  Ridge, Lola. Letter to Mary Austin.

  Kent State University, Special Collections and Archives, Kent, OH.

  Crane, Hart. Letter to Charles Harris. Hart Crane Papers.

  Kislak Center for Special Collections Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.

  Ridge, Lola. Letter to Carl Zigrosser.

  ---. Letter to Leonard Abbott.

  Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Washington, DC.

  Abbott, Leonard. Letter to Margaret Sanger.

  Huebsch, B. W. Letter to Lola Ridge.

  Ridge, Lola. Letters to B. W. Huebsch.

  ---. Letter to Francis Hackett.

  ---. Letter to Marian MacDowell.

  Lola Ridge Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA.

  Benét, Frances Rose. Letter to Lola Ridge.

  ---. Letters to Lola Ridge.

  Floyd, Louise Adams. Letter to Lola Ridge [enclosure from “Miriam”].

  Lawson, David. Letters to Lola Ridge.

  Ridg
e, Lola. Autograph book.

  ---. Diary.

  ---. Drawings.

  ---. Letter to Miss Bartlett.

  ---. Letters to David Lawson.

  ---. Letter to Florence Rena Sabin.

  ---. Letters to Louise Adams Floyd.

  ---. Letter to Mr. Small.

  ---. Letter to William Floyd.

  Scott, Evelyn. Letters to David Lawson.

  ---. Letters to Lola Ridge.

  Srabian, Leon. Letter to Lola Ridge.

  “Stan.” Letter to Lola Ridge. [Sept. 1930].

  Sykes, Gerald. Letter to Lola Ridge.

  Wilder, Charlotte. Letters to Lola Ridge.

  Marianne Moore Collection, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, PA.

  Moore, Marianne. Conversation Notebooks.

  ---. Letter from college. 1909.

  ---. Letters to David Lawson.

  ---. Letters to John Warner Moore.

  ---. Letters to Lola Ridge.

  Moore, Mary Warner. Letters to Lola Ridge.

  Mitchell Dawson Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.

  Dawson, Mitchell. Letters to Eva Dawson.

  ---. Letter to George Dawson.

  ---. Letter to Max Bodenheim.

  Johns, Orrick. Letter to Mitchell Dawson.

  Ridge, Lola. Letters to Mitchell Dawson.

  Williams, William Carlos. Letter to Mitchell Dawson.

  Mitchell Library, SLNSW, Sydney, Australia.

  Ridge, Lola. Letter to A.G. Stephens.

  New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York, NY.

  Ridge, Lola. Letter to Martin Becker. American Fund for Public Service Records.

  Ames, Elizabeth. Letters to Lola Ridge.

  Robinson, Edgar Arlington. Letter to Mr. Small. Edgar Arlington Robinson Papers.

  Mr. Small, letter to Edgar Arlington Robinson. Edgar Arlington Robinson Papers.

  Ridge, Lola. Letters to Elizabeth Ames.

  Ridge, Lola. Letters to Genevieve Taggard.

  Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. New York University.

  Masses Archive.

  Printed Ephemera.

  University of California, Berkeley.

  Goldman, Emma. Letters to Lola Ridge. Emma Goldman Papers.

  ---. Letter to Stella Ballantine. Emma Goldman Papers.

  ---. Letters to Evelyn Scott. Emma Goldman Papers.

  Seiffert, Marjorie. Letter to Helen Hoyt. Lyman Family Papers, The Bancroft Library.

  University of Chicago Library, Chicago, IL.

  Kreymborg, Alfred. Letter to Henry Rago. Poetry Magazine Papers.

  Ridge, Lola. Letters to Harriet Monroe. Harriet Monroe Papers.

  University of Virginia Libraries, Charlottesville, VA.

  Frost, Robert. Letter to Lola Ridge. Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.

  MacLeish, Archibald. Letter to Alfred Kreymborg. Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.

  Ridge, Lola. Letters to Alfred Kreymborg. Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.

  Kislak Center for Special Collections Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA.

  Ridge, Lola. Letter to Carl Zigrosser.

  ---. Letter to Leonard Abbott.

  William Floyd Estate. Fire Island National Seashore, NY.

  Floyd, William. William Floyd Estate

  Historic Furnishings Report.

  Floyd, Louise Adams. Guestbook.

  Williams (William Carlos) Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo, NY.

  Dawson, Mitchell. Letter to William Carlos Williams.

  Ridge, Lola. Letter to William Carlos Williams.

  PRINT SOURCES

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  ---. “Edwin Markham: Laureate of Labor.” Comrade 1.4 (1902): 74-75.

  Abbott, Leonard, ed. Francisco Ferrer: His Life, Work and Martyrdom. New York: Francisco Ferrer Assn., 1910.

  Adams, Ansel. Conversations with Ansel Adams. Berkeley: Regents of the University of California, 1978.

  Adams, Katherine H. A Group of Their Own: College Writing Courses and American Women Writers. Albany: SUNY UP, 2001.

  Adrian, Lynn M. “Emma Goldman and the Spirit of Artful Living: Philosophy and Politics in the Classical American Period.” Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman. Eds. Penny A. Weiss and Loretta Kensinger. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 2007.

  Ahearn, Barry, ed. Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. New York: New Directions, 1987.

  Aiken, Conrad. “The Literary Abbozzo.” Rev. of The Ghetto and Other Poems, by Lola Ridge. The Dial 25 Jan. 1919: 83–84.

  ---. “Speak as You Must.” The Dial July 1927: 63.

  Albers, Patricia. Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti. Oakland: U of California P, 2002.

  Aldington, Richard. An Imagist at War: The Complete War Poems of Richard Aldington. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2002.

  Alexander, Doris. Eugene O’Neill’s Last Plays: Separating Art from Autobiography. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 2005.

  Alkon, Paul Kent. Winston Churchill’s Imagination. Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont, 2006.

  Allego, Donna. The Construction and Role of Community in Political Long Poems by Twentieth-Century American Women Poets. Diss. Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 1997. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1997.

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  Arneson, Eric. “Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America.” Chicago Tribune 11 Nov. 2011.

  Astbury, L. “Cash Buyers Welcome: Australian Artists and Bohemians in the 1890s.” Journal of Australian Studies May 1987: 23-37.

  Austin, Mary Hunter. Literary America, 1903-1934: The Mary Austin Letters. Ed. Thomas Matthews Pearce. Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 1979.

  Avrich, Paul. An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978.

  ---. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.

  ---. The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States. Oakland: AK Press, 2005.

  Avrich, Karen and Paul Avrich. Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. Cambridge: Belknap, 2012.

  Baer, Ulrich. “f for Frogs.” The Rilke Alphabet. New York: Fordham UP, 2014.

  Baker, Jean H. Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion. New York: Macmillan, 2011.

  Bakunin, Mikhail. Marxism, Freedom, and the State. c.1870. London: Freedom, 1950.

  Baldwin, Neil. To All Gentleness: William Carlos Williams, the Doctor Poet. Baltimore: Black Classic, 2008.

  ---. Man Ray: American Artist. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2000.

  Barnes, Harper. Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Walker, 2008.

  Barnet, Andrea. All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913–1930. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2004.

  Bartlett, Alice Hunt. “The Dynamics of American Poetry.” Poetry Review 16 (1925).

  ---. “The Dynamics of American Poetry.” Poetry Review 48 (May/June 1934).

  Bates, Stephen. “Son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes Kills Himself.” New York Times 23 Mar. 2009.

  Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life.” Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists. Trans. Patrick E. Charvet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.

  Beffel, John Nicholas. “Miss Ridge to the Rescue.” Chicago Sun Times 23 Feb. 1919.

  ---. “William Carlos Williams Coming to Tell How Would Po
et Operate Universe.” Chicago Sun Tribune 12 Apr. 1919.

  Bell, Gertrude. The Letters of Gertrude Bell. Vol. 2. Ed. Lady Bell, D. B. E. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927.

  Bell, James Macintosh. The Geology of the Hokitika Sheet, North Westland Quadrangle. Wellington, New Zealand: Government Printer, 1906.

  Bendixen, Alfred and Steven R. Serafin, eds. “A Brittle Heaven.” The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003.

  Benét, Stephen Vincent. “Vincent Praises Poetic Story of Christ.” Chicago Daily Tribune 14 Dec. 1929: 13.

  Benét, William Rose. Fifty Poets: An American Auto-Anthology. Duffield and Green, 1933.

  ---. “Lola Ridge, 1883-1941.” Saturday Review of Literature 31 May 1941: 8.

  ---. “The Phoenix Nest.” Saturday Review of Literature 7 Dec. 1935: 46-47.

  ---. The Stairway of Surprise. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1947.

  Benjamin, Paul Lyman. “The Poetry of Existence.” The Survey: Social, Charitable, Civic: A Journal of Constructive Philanthropy 29 Nov. 1919.

  Bennett, Paul A. My Life a Loaded Gun: Female Creativity and Feminist Poetics. Boston: Beacon, 1986.

  ---. Poetry in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.

  Bennett, Scott H. Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915–1963. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2003.

  Bercovici, Konrad. It’s the Gypsy in Me. New York: Prentice Hall, 1941.

  ---. “Orphans as Guinea Pigs.” The Nation 29 June 1921: 911-13.

  Bercovici, Rion. “Life in the United States: A Radical Childhood.” Scribner’s Magazine Aug. 1932.

  Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. 5. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

  Berke, Nancy. “Anything That Burns You: The Social Poetry of Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard, and Margaret Walker.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 37 (Nov. 1998): 39–53.

  ---. “‘Electric Currents of Life:’ Lola Ridge’s Immigrant Flaneuserie.” American Studies 51.1/2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 27–47.

  ---. “Lola Ridge.” American Women Writers 1900-1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Laura Champion. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000.