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

10. Conversation at Midnight (New York: Harper, 1937).

11. It was also probably the most widely-read and publicized volume of American poetry of the decade, reviewed by well over one hundred American periodicals. It was chosen as the year's best book of poetry by fourteen of thirty-seven literary reviewers and journalists (see "Critics Vote on Best Books of 1937 in Country-Wide Poll," Saturday Review of Literature 17 [April 2, 1938]: 8-9). No other book received more than four votes.

12. Philip Blair Rice, "Part of a Poem, Part of a Play" (Review of Conversation at Midnight), Nation 145 (1937): 174. Even Tate could admit in 1931 that "she has survived her own time" to become "one of our most distinguished poets" - although he still emphasized her limitations ("Miss Millay's Sonnets," [Review of Fatal Interview], New Republic 66 [May 6, 1931]: 335, 336). 13. Atkins, vii.

14. "The Woman as Poet," in The World's Body (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1938), 76-110.

15. Alicia Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (Boston: Beacon, 1986); William Drake, The First Wave: Women Poets in America 1915-1945 (New York: Collier, 1987); and Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

16. Atkins, 108-109, 116.

17. In view of the analogy, developed below in my discussion of Ciardi's article on Millay, between males reading the work of female poets and rituals of sexual courting and conquest, it is worth noting Ransom's chosen verb to describe the activity of reading Wordsworth, to "go with," which has long meant to court, or even to have a sexual relationship with. If for Ransom "external nature" in its innocence was by definition feminine, then a male poet who inhabited that realm exclusively was playing a role which was effeminate or homosexual. Thus the "shame" Ransom felt at enjoying Wordsworth may have had as its source the critic's homophobic anxieties about sexual/imaginative relationships with other males, which he considered abhorrent or "monstrous."

18. John Ciardi, "Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Figure of Passionate Living," Saturday Review of Literature 33 (November 11, 1950): 8-9, 77.

19. The Saturday Review cruelly enhanced Ciardi's condemnation of the poet's ungraceful aging by printing four increasingly haggard photos. Such a sequence of photographs could presumably be generated for any poet as he or she aged. But in Millay's case the poet's physical condition took on an inordinate importance for the male custodians of her reputation.

20. A question of mine regarding "Justice Denied" at a 1992 MLA session on Millay elicited the response from a distinguished writer on female modernists and on Millay that she had struggled long and unsuccessfully to appreciate the poem as much more than empty political rhetoric, suggesting that productive reading of political poetry can still be difficult even for the most knowledgeable and sympathetic of readers. From a less knowledgeable reader (male), the same question produced the smug and disheartening reply that everybody knew that Millay had simply jumped on the Sacco-Vanzetti bandwagon, so how could we expect the poems she wrote about it to be any good? The effects of the effort to diminish the sincerity and efficacy of the political engagement of female modernists are evidently still with us.

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