The woman as political poet: Edna St. Vincent Millay and the mid-century canon

As Ciardi moved on to his college years we find him, even more bizarrely, blaming his devotion to the immature emotional melodrama of Millay's works for his falling in love "with our local Edna, or, more precisely, with the best of our local Ednas," of which he estimated two dozen even at his small college (9). It appears that to Ciardi women poets were not individuals but merely distillations of female consciousness, interchangeable members of a frivolous stereotype (call them Ednas), ultimately to be outgrown. (Of course even then Ciardi had the good taste to fall in love with the best his college had to offer.) Millay's feminist frankness regarding her own sexuality, and the exemplary position she occupied, were thus objectified and trivialized into a source of emotional titillation for the adolescent male mind, eventually to be discarded in embarrassment in one's more "mature" years.

This unenviable role was Millay's alone, and the critic flatly refused to let her grow beyond it. Ciardi felt that a sign of the maturity of his generation was that it had outgrown Millay's persona; but her own attempt to grow beyond that youthful persona he rejected out of hand. To Ciardi and his fellows Millay would forever be an embarrassing reminder of the "first rumblings and exaggerations" (9) of their own adolescence, both literary and sexual. By taking on such new and unsexy poetic subjects as social injustice and war, and in writing poems which sought to comprehend her own aging (such as the superb "The Fitting"), Millay had betrayed the critic's nostalgic fantasies of an idealized adolescent rebellion. The more serious forms of rebellion against unjust authority which Millay conveyed in her later work fell on totally deaf ears, works like Conversation providing "no subject for her gift" (77). Indeed, Ciardi asserted, it became increasingly clear that "the one subject she could make exciting" was "her youth" - again, circumscribing the scope of the female poet's subject matter to her own range of personal emotional experience.(19)

The biases of such mid-century critics as Ransom and Ciardi, and of course those of New Criticism more generally, created imposing obstacles to reading both poetry expressing female consciousness, and poetry of explicit political engagement, to the extent that when we turn to such poems as those I have discussed, we often feel the lack of a satisfactory vocabulary for sympathetically interpreting and evaluating them.(20) In struggling against the outworn but still operative notion, itself highly political, that explicit political commitments in poetry are somehow inevitable violations of artistic integrity, there is much we can learn from Millay, and from other poets in the various (lyric, feminist, dissident) traditions to which she belongs. In our efforts to articulate responsible revisions of the ways poetic modernism can be portrayed and valued, Millay's work offers us precious access to such critical issues as: the complex, potentially participatory relations between speakers and audiences; the relative benefits of explicit statement and specific topical reference as opposed to indirection and suggestion; the importance of alternative methods of constituting social identity through discourse, especially those which portray individuals as interdependent parts of an egalitarian collective rather than as masters of a hierarchical subject-object relationship; and the validity of the concept of belief and methods of expressing it in poetic discourse. Such questions are not merely of import to the canons of modernist poetry, but bear upon long-neglected debates on the function and potential of public discourse in our society.