Lola Ridge: Guggenheim

Picture postcard of the gardens at Yaddo, Laura Benét to Lola Ridge, 17 July 1929

Bernice Van Slyke to Lola Ridge [1930]. Annotated by Lola Ridge:"This capitulation of an old (literary) foe!"

Lola Ridge to David Lawson, 12 October 1930

One of Ridge’s fellow guests at Yaddo, the poet Berenice Van Slyke, wrote Ridge after hearing she was not well: “The burning spirit should have a house to stand like rock against the beating flame.” Near the end of her stay at Yaddo, Ridge wrote to her husband about the fall foliage:

From my window I can see the gorgeous woodline of the trees like evening fountains of gold that look as though they had been struck still in the act of flowing and left miraculously in mid air. Others are going up like scarlet flames in between all the colors—royal browns shading into purples—that wonderful color you find in some eyes—deep burning oranges and sultry red—the tree I call Evelyn, still of a lovely green. Why can’t human old age be like that?

Elizabeth Ames to Lola Ridge, 9 January 1935

Elizabeth Ames to Lola Ridge, 24 January 1933

Lola Ridge, studio photograph by Marjorie Content, 1935

Elizabeth Ames wrote to Ridge in 1933 inviting her to become a member of an ex officio group of Yaddo associates who made recommendations annually for the season’s guest list. In 1935 Ames recommended Ridge to the Guggenheim Foundation: “I told them what is verily true that you are one of the great spirits of our time.” The Guggenheim fellowship enabled Ridge to travel to Taos, New Mexico, and parts of Mexico.