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

The setting which framed the poem's description of the blighted land, "the sitting room" - traditional haven of the bourgeoisie - offered no comfort to the collective speaker, ironically becoming part of the poet's stinging rebuke to those who never committed themselves to the protest wholeheartedly, or who had given up too easily. Millay used persistent echoes of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" ("Let us abandon our gardens and go home/ And sit in the sitting-room"; "Let us sit here, sit still,/ Here in the sitting-room until we die"; "We shall not feel it again./ We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain") to mock the fashionably alienated stance towards contemporary society exemplified by Eliotic high modernism. The phrase which served as the refrain in these passages functioned not only as a conventional grammatical marker of future intention (as in "Let us go then, you and I"), but also as a plea from the enervated collective narrator for release from the exhausting burden of social responsibility ("let us go"). As her scornful portrayal of this persona suggested, the poet would not let her audience go with a clear conscience from the struggle for these gardens of America.

Those commentators unsympathetic to Millay's efforts to write poetry of explicit political critique have treated "Justice Denied in Massachusetts" as somewhat of a notorious fall from grace, the poet's first betrayal of her "natural lyric gift." In 1935, for example, Cleanth Brooks used the poem as a linchpin of his argument that Millay's "preoccupation with social and economic justice" had yielded "disappointing" results.(5) In order to do so, however, Brooks had to contort the poem into offering the "advice" that "those who loved justice" should "'sit in the sitting room,' convinced that justice was truly dead and that no other effort in behalf of justice was worth making" (1), exhibiting a lack of sensitivity to the poet's irony which was downright astonishing in a critic who would later make irony a constitutive element of his theory of literature. Recognizing no difference between the poem's speaker and the poet, Brooks went on to patronize Millay as having the "attitude . . . of a child whose latest and favorite project has been smashed" (1-2), evoking the stereotypical equation of woman - even woman writer - with child.

Not dissimilarly, in his 1938 "Tension in Poetry," one of the seminal essays of the nascent New Criticism, Allen Tate used "Justice Denied" as an example of "the fallacy of communication in poetry," which resulted not in genuine literary expression but in "patriotic poetry" which "you will find . . . equally in a ladylike lyric and in much of the political poetry of our time."(6) Like Brooks above, and Ransom below, Tate presented the image of a poetry tarnished by political zeal - whether patriotic or dissident does not seem to matter - quite gratuitously yoked to poetry exemplifying a female sensibility. Tare went on to use "Justice Denied" to develop another important tenet of New Criticism when he wondered ingenuously why "the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti should have anything to do with the rotting of the crops," or "How Massachusetts could cause a general desiccation" of the land (58). What the critic was doing here, of course, was attacking the whole notion of an allegorical method in poetry, making Millay's allegory seem absurd by taking it overly literally, and concluding (without justification) that "if you do not share those feelings" about social justice which the poet felt when she wrote the poem, "the lines and even the entire poem are impenetrably obscure" (58). Yet in the very same paragraph Tate had also objected to the allegorical system of Millay's poem as degraded "mass language" designed for (fallacious) communication. Tarred equally with ultrapersonal obscurity and meretricious cormmunicability, the writer of "Justice Denied" was clearly being used to exercise a broad range of the bugaboos and prohibitions of the developing New Criticism - to which, apparently, female poets as a group were particularly susceptible.