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

Ironically and perhaps hypocritically, however, Ransom's admiration of the "manly honesty" and "directness" championed by Donne and Pound emphatically did not extend to approval of Millay's use of openly erotic imagery in one of her famous sonnets (85-86). Ransom rather prudishly called these lines "rude in substance," rashly assuming that Donne no stranger himself to sexual imagery - would have been "revolted" by them as well. One cannot help but suspect that Ransom was particularly affronted at the spectacle of a female poet writing frankly about such subjects.

Of the many sexual stereotypes Ransom relied upon, the one which most strongly pertained to the issue of political engagement in poetry was the view which circumscribed the female consciousness to a subject matter of "personal moods" and "natural objects which call up love and pity" (104). The nonintellectuality of the female consciousness was supposedly compensated by a closeness to "the world of the simple senses" (77) in which she could remain comfortably "fixed in her famous attitudes . . . indifferent to intellectuality" (78). In contrast, the male of the species "does not like to impeach his integrity and leave his business in order to recover" the simpler, immature world he had left behind (77). Even in the putatively anti-industrial Agrarian New Criticism, then, nature as a focus for poetic subject matter had been feminized (and thus, in Ransom's view, diminished) to a remarkable degree. Even certain male poets such as Wordsworth could be viewed as excessively "feminine" in their preoccupation with subjects of personal emotion and communion with nature: "the male reader feels some shame even at going with Wordsworth, feeling it monstrous that he should flee the humanized world which he actually inhabits and breathe exclusively the innocence of external nature" (99).(17)

Against these anxieties over gender superiority and sexual potency Ransom buttressed "the Intellect," portrayed in an ultra-masculine, ultra-rationalist way which was highly relevant to the politics of the competing contemporary versions of modernism. Ransom explicitly identified "intellect" with "pure thought engaged in a series of technical or abstract processes" whose highest manifestation was "science" (100-101). One of the characterizing features of the "nonintellectual" female poet such as Millay was an ineptitude at handling poetic forms - since women's minds were insufficiently trained, and remained "not strict enough or expert enough to manage them" (103). In contrast, the male intellect worked by effectively "managing" and reshaping raw material into elegant, ordered form. This same picture of the intellect as a type of grasping tool which objectifies, dissects, and reconstructs an external Other undergirded the unwholesome view of the political which Millay had satirized in the male characters of Conversation at Midnight, who blindly made unequivocal political pronouncements, foolishly imagining they had achieved an Olympian vantage from which to grasp those situations fully and impartially. Ransom thus completely failed to comprehend the approach to political engagement Millay had presented in such poems as "Wine From These Grapes." There, as the persona is emotionally and physically marked with the force of her struggle against injustice, her consciousness/body encompasses both subject and object. In contrast to such holism, Ransom's crude dichotomizing of subject and object in his delineation of the creative intellect reveals a politically reactionary as well as a sexist aspect.