“To Yaddo” read the dedication. Thanking Ridge, Mrs. Ames wrote: “That you in your high estate in literature should pay this tribute to us with your magnum opus makes us proud indeed—and very humble.” Ridge herself did not shrink from acknowledging the book’s greatness. She wrote her husband: “It was ordained that I am to do this work. I was born for it when I was an infant in my cradle, this work that I am to do was already forecast.” She proclaimed: “Firehead was the first—all before that goes for next to nothing, it was only a preparation.” She celebrated and “had lunch with all my publishers on Monday the day my book came out. Tomorrow go to a tea Mrs. Kahn [perhaps the wife of philanthropist Otto Kahn who supported Hart Crane?] is giving for me.”
Firehead is a retelling of Christ’s crucifixion from the point of view of Magdelene, Judas, John, Peter, and Mary, this last character narrating a substantial portion of the poem. With its emphasis on the female, and in this instance, the maternal, it is divided into nine sections, like The Ghetto and Other Poems. Irregular blank verse, the book-long poem with its almost Shakespearean dramatic monologues is touched with Elizabethan “thous” and “thees,” sometimes uses end rhyme, and some sections of the book end in couplets. In style, it falls between the (mostly) free verse of Red Flag and the contortions of her sonnets in her last book, Dance of Fire, transforming her ever-present concern with world politics into a growing metaphysics.
Jesus is depicted as an anarchist. “He was a man dangerous to governments, a despiser/of rules, making a mockery of ordinance…” As critic Julie Lisella notes, every character carries some form of inner violence, in particular, jealousy—Magdalene for the disciple John, Mary for Jesus’s followers, and Judas for Magdalene’s pure love of Jesus. Jesus is the great seducer, “the searing fire of that glance,” who, like a committed Communist or one of those wild anarchists of Ridge’s youth, feels more for the masses than his mother. “Only a multitude could fan his eyes/To that deep blaze of tenderness.” At the end of the poem, Mary mourns his dead body with a simple nursery rhyme.
Then—as now—a poet had to make her own publicity efforts. “Josiah Tits[z]ell went three times to the New York Times and talked me up to the editor in chief—when he managed to see at last [i]t was all this that sold out first edition of Firehead on the first day,” writes Ridge to her husband. Titzell was an occasional poet, lyricist, novelist, critic, and as associate editor of Publisher’s Weekly, the man-in-the-know. When the Times’s laudatory review appeared, Ridge had mixed feelings: “Percy Hutchison’s review in the Times was founded on a complete misconception of the poem and it was favourable of course….” He likened the poetry to Dante’s, and wrote:
Those whose senses have been dulled with the paucity of imagination and emotion that brings so much of contemporary verse to a monotonous level of attainment will find themselves stung tinglingly awake by Miss Ridge’s multiplicity of images, drawn impartially from religious or secular sources, and the vibrant quality of her lines…It is forceful and beautiful, a work in which imagination and intelligence fuse in a white flame.
Many critics—and Ridge herself—said the book was written in direct response to the Sacco and Vanzetti trial and execution. Ridge asserted that she began writing it after two nights without sleep a week after their deaths. According to Nancy Berke in Women Poets on the Left, the book “reconfigures Christ as our most famous victim of institutionalized murder” as a protest to the country’s obsession with capital punishment. Certainly the idea is in the air. America Arraigned, an anthology of poetry sent to Governor Fuller in an effort to stop the execution, was divided into sections like “After the Intercession was Refused but Before the Crucifixion.” William Closson called Governor Fuller another Pontius Pilate in his poem selected for the anthology, and “Two Crucified” was the title of Jeannette Marks’s contribution. Ridge’s own poem “Two in the Death House,” referred not to the parallels of the execution to Christ’s but to immigrant labor:
Shall we “make heroes” of you—when all you ruminate,
Of songs, books, art, or the world’s thought,
Hard-learned, meagerly fitting, like worker’s clothes,
Askew upon you, might be talked out in one evening?
Of you—not having any bright possession, or good hope of it,
Save what lies in two hands—hands cognizant
Of the cool feel of fish and of the grains of leathers.
Hands made stiff
In such plain service as men live by, yet despise the servers.
While it must be true that the execution was of tremendous importance to Ridge, given that a few years later she writes “Via Ignis,” twenty-eight very abstract sonnets on the subject, the psychological impetus in Firehead seems to be much more about her guilt over the abandonment of her son Keith. Mary, the mother of Christ, reminisces in page after page:
I gave
To his small frantic lips, the one
Deep need of his that I could ever fill
And wrapped him in a finer linen than I wore
But that was all (Firehead 131)
“He was but eleven then…and this/Was almost the last time he looked on me./As one half-pleased to know that I was there” (133) and Mary’s acknowledgement: “I did not love him as a mother./Should have loved such a son. I know this now…” (136). The son too speaks:
Has my small ghost
That stumbled after thee so many years
So pressed its image on thy heart, that now
I am a stranger with a beard? ’Tis true
My bones were smaller when thou sawest me last,
My head a silken thistle for thy hand
To stroke and start away as from a sting (Firehead 93)
Ridge did not know whether her son was alive or dead after his letters stopped coming from Detroit 15 years earlier. As mentioned, Evelyn Scott responded to some lament Ridge had made about him around the time of Firehead’s publication with: “I can’t but believe he is old enough now to have read and realized something of what is in you and has been so wonderfully expressed.” Ridge’s hurried composition methods—aided by a literal fever, drugs, and anorexic visions—without time for revision—stripped bare a preoccupation different from the religious or the executed immigrants, despite cloaking the narrative with archaic language. The Yale Review came closest to such an evaluation:
Miss Ridge has attempted too much; she has ventured on a theme which many greater poets have wisely declined. She has treated this theme with force, but as we read we feel that this force is not the force of a poetic sensibility, but some darker power of neurotic violence.
Here the maternal emerges, incestuous yet divided, both burning and cold. William Drake remarks on Ridge’s whole oeuvre: “Ridge’s poetry is marked both by rage at injustice and by a fiercely maternal urgency, as if the disorder of the world arose out of a separation from the spiritual center the mother represents.” Ridge went transgressive. Amongst her “tirelessly extended metaphors” writes Lisella, lies “an anachronistic poetess-like lyric style in the service of clearly un-lady-like material.” “Let thy trumpeting mountains urinate upon her their scalding lavas.” “Dance, dance with thy legs agape—call on hills to enter thee!/Ravish her, O hills!”
The far-off mutter of the desert, licking her dry parts…
Her sands
Lolling in the darkness…tufts of grass on the bare hills…the stretched
Sinews between mountains. (Firehead, 47)
Finally, after it seems that Christ has raped his mother, he begs to return to her: “Thou wound of time that gangrenes now, thou mud of ages,/open and take back thy son.”
“Nice is the one adjective in the world that is laughable applied to any single thing I have ever written,” Ridge writes two years later. Such outrageousness did not prevent the radical preacher John Haynes Holmes, founding member of both the N.A.A.C.P. and A.C.L.U. and friend of William Floyd, from having her read from Firehead at the Community Church on P
ark Avenue.
It was hardly the first time she used sex as a shock tactic. Among other examples, there is “Brooklyn Bridge” in her first book, with its sadomasochistic overtones:
Pythoness body—arching
Over the night like an ecstasy—
I feel your coils tightening…
And the world’s lessening breath. (Ghetto 70)
and “After the Recital” in Red Flag, with its suggestion of interracial sex when anti-miscegenation laws were in effect nationwide until 1967, and violations might result in mob punishment or lynchings. As previously mentioned, Roland Hayes was the internationally famous black tenor to whom the poem is dedicated.
Who cared…amid the suave-shoed, white-skinned day
That scanned his body…if beneath her fires
Yet throbbing like five wounds, unhealed, he lay
Back turned…as one not caring over much
To see her golden head upon the spires
And all the windows flower at the touch. (Red Flag 79)
Those put on the spot by Ridge did not know what to say about Firehead. “Criticism of it is quite beyond me,” wrote the poet Gerald Sykes, who had been at Yaddo with her. He had motive for circumspection: she supported his Guggenheim application a year later. Evelyn Scott provided a promotional insert for the book but mentioned Firehead only in the last two lines and then rather offhandedly: “In her new book, ‘Firehead,’ Miss Ridge, superlatively rational, superlatively modern, has defied the cowardice of an age which, in the fear of making itself laughed at, has made itself paltry.” Moore must have annoyed Ridge with the Christian focus of her interpretation: “There are triumphs of technique: flame-touched attributes of sanctity emerge; we are led to deliberate upon Christ’s mystic power.” Only Horace Gregory, with his vantage of a decade later, writes in A History of American Poetry, that her “reiterated images of light within the poem, effective as they were upon first reading, dazzled rather than enlightened the understanding of her sympathetic critics.”
That Robinson Jeffers’s Dear Judas came out at the same time probably helped her sales. Certainly the two books were often reviewed together. The treatment of their Crucifixions was close, although Jeffers was influenced by Noh plays rather than Ridge’s Elizabethan models. Like Ridge, Jeffers wasn’t interested in Christianity except as a means of using the most familiar story of Western civilization as a frame for poetic drama. This review from the magazine Bozart is a good example of how the books were seen side-by-side.
Necessarily the conception of Jeffers is more subtle and more sophisticated than that of his less mysterious opponent…Lola Ridge…offering her glitter and golden intensity of descriptive epithet, victoriously in the manner of a pageant, as contrasted with the agonizing dumbshow of Jeffers….[Judas] is to Jeffers the lover of Christ; he is to Ridge the lover of Magdalene. To Jeffers he is possibly the hero of the tragedy; to Ridge he is not the impossible villain… Lola Ridge’s poem is one of the most firmly marrowed long poems by a woman to come from our generation; and Robinson Jeffers’s another link to that iron chain whereby the great prison themselves to the eternal.
Tambour, a magazine that published Williams, Shaw, and Dreiser, carried this evaluation: “I believe Miss Ridge’s book is in all manners more momentous than that of Jeffers, no mean achievement either.” In the end Jeffers received far fewer reviews and perhaps that is why he refused to give Ridge an award from Poetry two years later. “I have been thinking seriously about our selection,” he writes Harriet Monroe, and I’ve talked to a few friends, two of whom suggested Lola Ridge. I am not an enthusiast for her work, but “Firehead” was much admired. I believe she was ill and poor when it was being written, and no doubt she is still in need. What do you think of her?…if the casting vote is left to me I’ll vote for MacLeish…who is probably in need or he wouldn’t be working for “Fortune” magazine.
Ridge had no idea of his antipathy. “Jeffers was for me,” she writes Louise Adams Floyd, “but could not convince the others, especially Monroe and each of the other judges had a choice…Finally they all compromised on Alexander McLeish [sic].” In another letter, Ridge revealed a more competitive stance: “A great puritan poet,” she writes, “but I did not think so much of [Dear Judas.]” Still she dedicated an admiring poem to him in her last book, recommended him to others, and often shared copies of his work. In 1932, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, but his politically aloof, really anarchist leanings—“boys will hang Hitler and Roosevelt in one tree”—caused him to fall out of favor, just as Ridge did.
Originally Firehead was to be a book set in New York, but Ridge eventually decided it was the first of what was to be a five-volume poetry series entitled Lightwheel. The series title is perhaps a re-visioning of the huge 50-foot waterwheels that turned in Kanieri Township, and her preoccupation with light and fire born from the ever-present threat of fire in Hokitika. But, in the case of the book Firehead, there’s just the scorched earth of ambition. While The Ghetto and Other Poems and Sun-up and Other Poems and parts of Red Flag have an immediacy of image and voice that is contemporary, in Firehead, Ridge’s vision outpaces the material, and the work sounds dated and wrought. It’s not the religious theme that proves difficult. Eliot’s “Prufrock” and Pound’s Cantos deal with religion. It’s not that other poets didn’t have grand ambitions—there’s the Cantos, the already published “Prufrock,” Williams working on Paterson, H.D. 10 years from beginning her Trilogy—they were all ambitious. Ridge’s hubris, the flip side of ambition, was her downfall. If Shelley could write “The Mask of Anarchy” in six days, she could write Firehead in six weeks. Only Davy saw drafts and he didn’t offer her anything other than encouragement. Perhaps he understood all her obscure allusions and followed the logic of her lines. In any case, she gave herself hardly any time at all to improve the first 53 pages. “Of Firehead…it is not to go to printer for 10 days—in case I want to make alterations.”
Ridge uses “twixt” on the third page of the poem, ringing a death knell for modernism. Or rather, like cummings re-thinking how words move on the page or Williams admitting the demotic, Ridge is asking the reader to admit that “twixt” and dense illusion and archaic forms like inversion are techniques that will enliven the modernist poem. After all, other modernists were insisting on similar tactics. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote ten sonnets for breakfast and did not shrink from “thees” and “thous,” and of course Crane used heightened language and many inversions in “To Brooklyn Bridge,” parts of which Ridge had published while editing Broom. Her dizzying metaphorical leaps anticipated or followed or at least paralleled Crane’s dictum in 1926: “The nuances of feeling and observation in a poem may well call for certain liberties which you claim the poet has no right to take. I am simply making the claim that the poet does have that authority, and that to deny it is to limit the scope of the medium so considerably as to outlaw some of the richest genius of the past.” Deutsch explains it: “The modern poet moves from the style of one period…with unexampled freedom…Pope might translate Shakespeare into 18th-century verse, while the modern can draw on both.” Where Ridge’s The Ghetto and Other Poems heralded proletarian modernism, Firehead forged a way into its Elizabethan form. To some extent the strategy of such borrowings are the same as Jeffers appropriating the Noh plays or Pound the troubadours’ voices.
“To Brooklyn Bridge” was published a year after Firehead, in 1930. Crane begins it with a very ornate Elizabethan inversion:
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
By the fourth stanza he uses “thee” and “thou” just as freely as Ridge, to refer to the bridge as if it were a deity.
And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!
Several stanzas later there�
�s the addition of the antique “guerdon,” “dost,” and “bestow”
And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon…Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show
Randall Jarrell wrote: “The Bridge does not succeed as a unified work of art, partly because some of its poems are bad or mediocre.” Tennessee Williams, a big fan of Crane, writes that he could
hardly understand a single line—of course the individual lines aren’t supposed to be intelligible. The message, if there actually is one, comes from the total effect…it is a lot of raw material, all significant and moving but not chiseled into any communicative shape.
But the big critics adored Crane: “The only poet of the twentieth century that I could secretly set above Yeats and Stevens,” writes critic Harold Bloom. Harvard critic Helen Vendler deemed “Crane’s ‘Voyages’ the greatest contemporary American love poem.” Critic David Yezzi suggests that:
his very purpose in writing the poem was to arrive at non-rational, connotative connections that could not be fully elucidated in logical terms. In a sense, what disturbed Crane’s editors most about his poetry was its resistance to paraphrase, or as Harrison Smith said, an irritation with “the denseness of one’s own intellect.”
Although a childhood friend of Crane’s, the publisher Harrison Smith refused to bring out his books. He preferred Lola Ridge.
Among today’s poets, Crane’s reputation appears, pace Bloom and Vendler, a case of the “Emperor’s New Clothes.” In a Field magazine symposium on his work, the introduction outlines how his work is evaluated by contemporary poets:
Anything That Burns You Page 29