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

As the 1930's continued, the stubborn Depression and the ominous rise of fascism gave Millay no reason to doubt her commitment to a poetics of public speech, and indeed, stimulated her to perhaps her most ambitious work of explicit political commentary, Conversation at Midnight (1937), which consists of dramatized exchanges among seven male New Yorkers who constituted a spectrum of the various political positions of the time, from Republican stockholder to communist intellectual.(10) That Millay presumed to portray the contemporary male psyche, often satirically, would not naturally have endeared the work to conservative male critics. But its political aspect was perhaps even more problematic. By creating a quasi-public setting whose late-night aspect also allowed for intimately personal utterance, Millay's conversational form collapsed conventional divisions between public rhetoric and personal lyric. In representing the rhythms of prolonged conversation as a disjoined collage of subject matter and shifting emotional nuance, she demonstrated how some central formal attributes of high modernism could be appropriated for a poetry based not on alienated individualism but on social dialogue.

Although liberal and communist arguments carry more weight in the poem than others, Millay did not make a programmatic intervention on behalf of any political position. Indeed, the insufficiency of any single dogma was exactly the point. The poem rejects the analytical subject-object structure of the monolithic political assertion ("I have surveyed this situation and here is how it is"), and instead creates a space for political polyphony, in which everyone's argument is accorded a hearing, in which each character's often unreflective and self-satisfied opinions are repeatedly challenged and qualified, and through which readers might have the chance to examine the strengths and weaknesses of various points of view. Ultimately what the poem affirms most strongly is the process of public debate itself. Even more than Millay's previous 1930's volumes, Conversation at Midnight assertively transgresses the generic limitations of the personal lyric in the direction of social engagement, and deserves sympathetic attention by critics interested in reclaiming the politically progressive aspect of American modernism.(11)

2

As Millay attempted quite consciously to shift her own position, and by extension, the position of women within American poetry, towards explicit social engagement, her efforts were by no means entirely unnoticed or unappreciated. That notion is a myth promulgated with substantial success by later denigrators. On the contrary, even some of the detractors of Millay's works of the 1930's tended to acknowledge that she was "one of the few poets of her generation who have continued to grow."(12) To survey critical discourse on Millay through that decade is to discover a multitude of evaluative positions, sometimes existing contradictorily within individual pieces. The only consensus held about Millay was that of her enormous renown. As Atkins put it somewhat hyperbolically, "Everyone recognizes that Edna St. Vincent Millay represents our time to itself much as Tennyson or Byron the period of Romanticism."(13)