Responding to the Rhythms of Labor: Lola Ridge’s Work Songs in The Ghetto and Other Poems

Although nearly forgotten by the end of the twentieth century, Irish-born poet Lola Ridge is now recognized as a highly influential, socially engaged writer and editor who was active in various Modernist and activist circles in the United States from 1907-1941. This essay discusses the lesser-known poems within the “Labor” section of her 1918 publication, The Ghetto and Other Poems. I suggest that these labor poems draw from and participate in the American traditions of work and sorrow songs, thereby positioning Ridge as an avant-garde poet of the working class, a kind of Modernist troubadour. I read Ridge’s “The Song of Iron” alongside Kane O’Donnell’s 1863 long poem, also titled “The Song of Iron,” drawing intertextual connections between these poems, both of which appropriate hymn-like rhythms that gesture toward the work and sorrow song traditions. I address how Ridge’s engagement with these traditions attempts to “make new” various images, metaphors, and cadences found in O’Donnell’s poem, and I situate Ridge’s “Labor” poems within the context of World War One, conscription, labor radicalization, and the suppression of free speech by the federal government. I offer close readings of select poems to further demonstrate her textual play with antiphony and other communal poetics and themes, all of which model on the page the collective action necessary to challenge the capitalist and imperialist aims of the modern era.