‘Strange symbols to the new dawn’: Lola Ridge, Anarchist Networks, and the Carceral Elegy

Abstract

Lola Ridge is a poet whose work is both pedagogic and visionary. Born in Dublin, moving to Australasia and then to the US, Ridge characterized the transnational experience that helped to shape anarchist networks in New York in the early decades of the twentieth century. In addition to her involvement in the activities of the Ferrer Center Modern School, she both contributed to, and edited, a number of literary magazines. Her poems document the poverty of her surroundings and the complex pressures faced by the city's immigrant communities, as well as featuring a range of political activists and thinkers, from prominent figures to unidentified political groups ‘converging in meeting halls’. Throughout her writing life she engaged deeply with issues of social justice and with the figure of the prisoner as exemplary of social marginalization. This essay examines what may be termed Ridge's ‘carceral elegies’, situating them in the wider context of revolutionary Ireland, and its place in New York literary culture.