page_title: Ridgely Torrence
section_title: Poet and playwright
hierarchical_section_title: Ridgely Torrence / Career / Poet and playwright
caption_attribution_description: The Colony Hall and the Sigma Alpha Iota Cottage (unfinished at the time)
context_page_description: Frederic Ridgely Torrence was an American poet, and editor. He received the Shelley Memorial Award in 1942 and the Academy of American Poets' Fellowship in 1947.
context_section_description: During his early year in New York, he became part of a circle of poets that included E. A. Robinson, William Vaughn Moody, and Robert Frost. In 1900, he published The House of a Hundred Lights, which Edmund Clarence Stedman helped him revise.
  The verse plays, showing the influence of John Millington Synge, showed realistic portrayals of African Americans, and a revolt against their station in society. While his verse dramas were published as books, they were not produced as plays.
  In 1914, his one-act play Granny Maumee, which was first performed by a white case, helped create opportunities for black actors in theaters in America when it was produced with black actors in 1917. It was "one of the first opportunities for serious black actors". Torrence's collection of plays, Three Plays for a Negro Theater premiered in 1917, as a production of the Negro Players. He work was noteworthy in its blending of compassion and strength.
  Torrence had fellowships to MacDowell Colony, the artist colony, in 1914, 1917, and then every year from 1942 to 1950. In 1938, he was poet in residence at Antioch College and in 1941 to 1942, he was Fellow in Creative Writing at Miami University.
  He was poetry editor of The New Republic (1920–33), mentoring Louise Bogan. He organized the National Survey of the Negro Theater (1939), for the Rockefeller Foundation. The posthumous book Poems, of Torrence's selected poetry, was published in 1952. He chose works that reflected his values, compassion for others, sense of injustice among people, and a faith in mankind.
  I trust the people as I trust the stars.
  And if they lose the reckoning they will find it,
   For they must learn and by their griefs they will,
  Must learn to steer themselves, steer or be steered.
  — Ridgely Torrence, Lincoln's Dream
caption: The Colony Hall and the Sigma Alpha Iota Cottage (unfinished at the time), 1921, MacDowell Colony
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