Description: Verses is a book-length collection of poems that Ridge wrote when she lived in New Zealand and Australia, before she came to the United States in 1907. Completed by 1905, Verses was submitted to the Sydney Bulletin's literary editor for possible book publication.
Brief description: Lola Ridge, poet, editor, and passionate crusader for social justice, was a fixture of the New York literary avant-garde in the early twentieth century. Ridge's outspoken political views and vivid, original verse earned her a place of prominence amidst such left-wing reformers and artists as Kay Boyle, John Dos Passos, and Harold Loeb, as well as luminaries of modernist American poetry including William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane. However, since her death in 1941, Ridge's writing has become little more than a footnote to the history of American modernist poetry.