EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY: GENERAL COMMENTARY

COLIN FALCK (ESSAY DATE JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1992)

SOURCE: Falck, Colin. "The Occulting of Edna Millay." P. N. Review 18, no. 3 (January/February 1992): 21-3.

In the following essay, Falck defends Millay's poetic reputation, identifying her as a skilled lyric-ironist whose work addresses the conflict between societal roles and a woman's spiritual independence. Falck also contends that Millay has fared poorly with critics because her verse is straightforward and well-executed, prompting little need for interpretation.

As the centenary—1992—of her birth approaches, thoughtful admirers of Edna St Vincent Millay's poetry are going to have to ask themselves how it can be that the poet who was once the most widely known living poet in human history should now be so resoundingly neglected in official literary circles only four decades after her death. How is it that her whole unusually varied output can be represented by the same predictable two or three poems in the 'serious' anthologies, or that her name is a name you will perhaps occasionally encounter in certain secondary school English classes but will also inescapably leave behind there along with many other childish things? Is it—they will perhaps ask—a fear of the directness and simplicity of Millay's poetry, and of the challenge it poses to us to experience life with something of the intensity with which earlier and less ironic generations experienced it, that mainly lies behind her disappearance from view? Theories may be put forward, but if 1992 sees any discussion of Millay at all it will already mark a turnaround in her reputation, since as things currently stand she is almost wholly the captive of her least poetically-educated readers (for the most part self-confessedly ageing, sentimental and backward-looking) and is discussed by almost no one.

One of the most striking things about Millay's sensibility is that irony was always a deep need of her nature—and yet that she never at any time succumbed to the temptation to allow it to become the deepest need of all. Her satirical intelligence was as sharp as that of poets like E. A. Robinson or Frost or Eliot, and her wit—as in her letters or in her Greenwich Village-period writings for such journals as Vanity Fair—often as mercurial as Wilde's; yet her deepest instinct was always to pass through and beyond such left-handed engagements with the times she lived in and to address herself to the more essential, and essentially tragic, truths of human existence. Transcending life's ironies rather than taking her stand in them, she reached towards what Blake might have seen as a radical innocence on the far side of the 20th century we know.

A world-embracing intensity and a world-repudiating scorn were co-present in Millay's vision from the start, and the precocious nineteen-year-old schoolgirl from Camden, Maine who made her name with her two-hundred-line tetrameter poem 'Renascence' and the style-conscious Greenwich Village ironist of only a few years later were one and the same individual.

There is no incompatibility, and scarcely a very dramatic transition, between the final lines of 'Renascence' —

But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by

—and the advice which Millay (under her pseudonym Nancy Boyd) gave to an imaginary Greenwich Village correspondent worried about her inability to attract a sufficient number of aspiring artists to her apartment:

The trouble is with the ashtrays; remove them. Get into the habit when alone of crushing out your cigarette against the wall-paper, or dropping it on the floor and carelessly grinding it into the rug, or tossing it in the general direction of the fire-place, if you have one, being very sure never to look anxiously after it to see where it lands. This easy manner on your part will do more than anything else to put your guests at ease. Soon they will be using your studio as if it were their own, going to sleep with their feet in the coffee-tray, wiping paint from their hair and elbows upon the sofa-pillows, making sketches on the walls of unclothed people with small heads and over-developed muscles, and dropping ashes just everywhere.

What links these very different kinds of exhortation together is poetic passion and a fierce contempt for all the prevailing forms of inauthentic living. Millay is less well understood as a backward-looking sentimentalist than as a lyricironist in a tradition which (as well as Blake and Emily Dickinson) includes the later French Symbolists, Wilde, Hardy, Housman and the younger Eliot, as well as many of the existentialist prose writers of the later 19th and earlier 20th centuries.

The existential fierceness with which Millay rejected—on behalf of herself, of all women, of all people—society's offered roles is expressed in poem after poem and is a central preoccupation of her earlier work. She could give such wildness a brilliant and disturbing comic turn, as in her famous 'My candle burns at both ends,' or in its less famous companion-epigram—

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

—but the twentiesish precariousness of such spiritual integrity is never entirely distinguishable from nervous desperation or exhaustion. Wisdom was not her concern (although she later came to express a good deal of it); instead, she gives us an unworldly fervor and a refusal to compromise with the available worldly interpretations of life's meanings. In this, she has more in common with writers like Dostoevsky or Kafka than with the American women poets with whom she has usually been routinely compared. In the more serious and less epigrammatical of her early poems there is no fulfilment to be found in the world of ordinarily-breathing human passion:

Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock your door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying!

A mysterious, once-heard voice can haunt us to the very end of what we think of as our lives:

Earth now
On the busy brow.
And where is the voice that I heard crying?

Trains can beguile us from our sleep and from our daily commitments—'there isn't a train I wouldn't take, / No matter where it's going'—and the sea continually calls to us with messages both of liberation and of extinction. All of these are the powerful and unsettling apprehensions of a poet for whom life's normal options are little more than options in claustrophobia: a poet who is ultimately homeless.

Millay's refusal to accept the actualities of life as they normally come to us can extend to an almost-philosophical arraignment of the physical body itself. Sometimes she commits herself to a notion (it is a philosophical illusion, in fact) of the essential separateness of mind and body, and makes a resigned and scornful poetry out of it. At other times, and more penetratingly, she recognizes that the war between body and soul that afflicts her is really not a metaphysical necessity but a war between a woman's spiritual independence and the roles that society, and especially men, have insisted on casting her in. Many of her poems explore this theme with great intelligence, and what may look superficially like the celebration or indulgence of flightiness (a notion of Millay and of her work which has dogged her reputation for half a century) is invariably some form of repudiation of the conventionally institutionalized subjection of women. Women may at times be witless, but there are reasons why they have come to be so, and there are other reasons why they may choose to go on acting so. In a sonnet like 'I think I should have loved you presently' Millay both embraces, and also goes beyond, the classic feminist analyses of writers such as Wollstonecraft and Mill (and it is no surprise that she was willing to stand up and be counted as a militantly political feminist at many points throughout her life). She goes beyond them, because she was unwilling ever to repudiate or to down-value the power and intensity of heterosexual love. She tried instead to write about the realities of such love; and what may sometimes come across to us as yet more poetry in the tradition of 'No love endures' is very often a poetry that goes as deeply as poetry itself ever can into the question of why no love endures. Here Millay's preoccupations come close to those of D. H. Lawrence, and her insights are no less perceptive or persuasive than his. What sets Millay apart from—and above—much present-day feminist theorizing and the more aggressive kinds of feminist poetry is that she is able to experience and to present love, both in its initial impulse and in its essential nature, as a passionate surrender. The question is where, in a better world, such a surrender might take us to.

In her later volumes Millay emerges as a truly philosophical poet, and her preoccupations with nature, with death, and with the nobilities and shortcomings of human aspirations are expressed in a range of intellectually substantial and technically widely varying poems. In her reflections on death, Millay is unable to attain to any state which might be seen as one of renunciation or resignation (and is hardly very unusual in this, even among poets), but she comes close to it on a few occasions, as in 'From a Train Window' :

Precious
In the early light, reassuring
Is the grave-scarred hillside
As if after all, the earth might know what it is about.

More often, her vision is stoic and Hardyish, and she acknowledges the reality of death both for herself and for others, but without acceptance: 'I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death'; 'I am not resigned.'

As we judge her now, we must judge Millay essentially as a lyricist. But we can also perhaps now see that she is a lyricist who is capable of incorporating a wide-ranging, sophisticated, and philosophically respectable kind of thought into her emotional apprehensions. Her superb intelligence was always more effectively expressed through the lyricist's flash of insight than through any kind of weightier lucubration. Where she uses a form as intellectually pointed as the Shakespearian sonnet (and some of her Shakespearian sonnets, such as 'Pity me not because the light of day,' or 'Now by the path I climbed, I journey back,' are surely among the best poems in this form in the language), it is usually the imagery in the earlier part of the poem that does most of the work, to make way for a quietly inevitable conclusion. Many of Millay's most powerful lines, and several of her most powerful poems, achieve their effect in a way that leaves very little for the reader or critic to gain by means of detailed interpretation. Consider, for example, the atmospherically-charged final lines of 'Winter Night' :

The day has gone in hewing and felling,
Sawing and drawing wood to the dwelling
For the night of talk and story-telling.
…
Here are question and reply,
And the fire reflected in the thinking eye.
So peace, and let the bob-cat cry.

Much could be said about this 'thinking eye' and this 'bob-cat,' but we are surely here dealing with a case where there are unlimitedly many 'reasons' which (as William Empson long ago put it) 'combine to give the line [s their] beauty,' and where the meaning is 'hardly in reach of the analyst at all'. This is Millay's method over and over, and it may account for the fact that perhaps more than any other modern poet she has remained popular among such people as still read poetry while continuing to elude systematic analysis and most of those who practise it.

As well as exhibiting all these very modern poetic qualities Millay was also a brilliantly innovative verse technician—an aspect of her distinctively 20th-century poetic nature which has been wholly obscured by her reputation as a sonneteer and a purveyor of imitatively Housmanish quatrains. To the Whitmanian heritage of cadenced free verse she brings the greater reflective tightness of Robinson Jeffers (among the few icons in Millay's personal library was a framed photograph of Jeffers, her near-contemporary) and—still working with long lines—the kind of rhyming and sound-patterning which had so far only rarely been used in free verse (as for example by Pound and Eliot—who were, however, usually more interested in end-than in internal rhyming). The result is a formidable combination, and uniquely Millay's. The closing lines of 'New England Spring, 1942' are one of its best exemplifications:

But Spring is wise. Pale and with gentle eyes, one day
somewhat she advances;
The next, with a flurry of snow into flake-filled skies retreats
before the heat in our eyes, and the thing designed
By the sick and longing mind in its lonely fancies—
The sally which would force her and take her.
And Spring is kind.
Should she come running headlong in a wind-whipped acre
Of daffodil skirts down the mountain into this dark valley we
would go blind.

Nothing like this exists anywhere else in English-language poetry, unless it be in others of Millay's later poems: the meaning of the lines is carried more by the rhythmic hesitations, the subtly insistent internal-rhyme structure and the skilfully-judged punctuation than by the usual poetic devices which are familiar to us in explicatory analysis. This is perhaps a still-unclosed chapter in modern versification.

Millay is a poet who has been buried twice over: once by the generation that needed to get modernism established, and a second time by the academically-inclined critics who have interested themselves only in poetry which presents verbal and intellectual complexities that can be discussed in professional articles or in the seminar room. Millay is to an almost embarrassing degree—but we should ask who it is that ought to be embarrassed—not that kind of poet. But she has also been badly misrepresented by those critics who have gone to the trouble of finding reasons for rejecting her work. Her use of traditional forms, for example, is often deceptive: for all the poems where she seems to fall into pastiche (as in some of her sonnets, or some of her early pieces of Housmanish irony) there are others where she is engaged in something rather more subtle. The interplay between the grand manner and the artless-conversational is essential to much of her work (it first shows itself in 'Renascence' ), and it enables her, as it also did later poets like Auden or Philip Larkin, to give the traditional forms a new lease of credibility. Sometimes her use of the grand manner seems almost designed to subvert itself: the sonnet 'Whereas at morning in a jeweled crown,' about a turbulent contemporary relationship, could seem almost 'post-modernist' in the way it clears the air of the very poetic devices it uses:

Whereas at morning in a jeweled crown
I bit my fingers and was hard to please,
Having shook disaster till the fruit fell down
I feel tonight more happy and at ease:
Feet running in the corridors, men quick-
Buckling their sword-belts bumping down the stair,
Challenge, and rattling bridge-chain, and the click
Of hooves on pavement—this will clear the air.

There will perhaps always be those who see Millay's poetry as too simple, too sensuous, too passionate, too old-fashioned, too New England, too un-urban, too un-intellectual, too narrow-ranged, too light-weight, or just too straightforwardly comprehensible, but this can hardly justify the depths of neglect into which her work has been allowed to fall during the past forty years or so. The occulting of Millay's reputation has been one of the literary scandals of the 20th century, and it is time we found a proper place for this intense, thoughtful, and magnificently literate poet.

JOSEPH AIMONE (ESSAY DATE 1997)

SOURCE: Aimone, Joseph. "Millay's Big Book, or the Feminist Formalist as Modern." In Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Re-Readings, edited by Elizabeth Jane Harrison and Shirley Peterson, pp. 1-13. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Aimone takes issue with critics who have dismissed Millay's work for lacking the aesthetics of modernism, noting that Millay does, at times, employ free verse and other modern techniques and that her writing can be viewed as a reaction against male-dominated literary forms, both traditional and modern.

At best form gives concinnity, precision,
paring of words and widening of vision,
play for the mind, focus that is self-critical.
Poets, and poems, are not apolitical.
Women and other radicals who choose
venerable vessels for subversive use
affirm what Sophomore Survey often fails
to note: God and Anonymous are not white males.
"We always crafted language just as they did.
We have the use, and we reclaim the credit"

—Marilyn Hacker, Taking Notice, 1980

Few contemporary feminist poets (though perhaps a growing share) are as sanguine as Marilyn Hacker about the use of traditional forms. "Such forms remind us too much of Edna St. Vincent Millay," one can almost hear them say. Even feminist critics with their hearts set on some kind of recuperation of Millay concede first the hurdles her reputation puts between them and their goal, foremost often her formalism. Debra Fried, closest to my own views, introduces a scrupulous study of the complex insinuations of Millay's sonneteering by noting, "In a critical climate in which we are rediscovering the powerful experiments of American women poets in the modernist era, the tidy verses of Edna St. Vincent Millay have remained something of an embarrassment" (229). In Masks Outrageous and Austere, the second volume of her landmark historical study of American women poets, Cheryl Walker, equally embarrassed, identifies Millay as one of the last of the "nightingale" poets. Walker laments that "in truth, Millay was not really subversive" (164). In Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word Suzanne Clark situates her limited recuperation of Millay in a broader effort to recapture the sentimental, which Clark identifies as the repressed now returning to haunt the modernist and postmodernist text in the form of feminism (provided other feminists grasp her point and agree). But this recognition does not reelevate Millay to speaking with authority, especially regarding verse technique: "For her (passive?) repetition of conventional literary forms, the former gestures of power, is somehow feminine, slavish" (Clark 67). Even parenthetic doubts, while they hit on the crucial point of Millay's strategy of appropriation of male-dominated tradition, cannot undo Clark's clear vote of condemnation for Millay's "repetition."¹

Such critics are not alone. In 1992 Amy Clampitt, a redoubtable contemporary poet, in a New Republic review of the recent Centenary Edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay's Selected Poems, sums up a common view of Millay: "Whatever else may be said of it, the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay is not modern" (44). I disagree with Clampitt, both about Millay and about the critical assumptions that underlie such a dismissive assessment. Millay was arguably an exemplary modern poet and an exemplary feminist poet.

Clampitt's reasons for her conclusion begin with oblique insinuation: She notes that Millay had harsh if casual words for the Armory show (which she attended) and for Duchamp (on a postcard). She faults Millay that she "failed to seek [Pound] out the year or two they were both in Paris" (44). Millay was by far the more widely published and often-read poet—but it seems she didn't know her proper place at the feet of the Master. Clampitt holds youthful fondness for poetry and Shakespeare in particular against Millay, explaining Millay's carefree use of archaic and literary locutions as a product of an overly bookish childhood, "[growing] up with book words and literaryisms" (Clampitt 45). Clampitt casually reproduces modernist prejudice against formal verse, claiming that "the effects produced by it are limited," and that "the bewilderments clutched at and grappled with by [William Carlos] Williams are beyond the ordering of anything so brittle" (Clampitt 45). This aesthetic of toughness, strength, and effectiveness sounds vaguely political or perhaps commercial, the preferred characteristics of a good district attorney in an era of rising crime or of a household cleaning utensil that gets the job done without breaking or requiring extra work. (One wonders if poetry really ought to be tough, strong, and effective, or at least whether that trio of utilitarian virtues are the most important values good poetry has.) But the killing blow is accusing Millay of a shallowness of intellect somehow directly a result of her formalism: "There is hardly any room for ambiguity of thought or feeling—for anything that critical analysis might take hold of or take apart" (Clampitt 45). Even Clampitt's praise of Millay (for she likes her as much as she can) suggests that what is right about Millay's best work is nothing Millay tried to achieve consciously: "a sensuous freshness that slips in and out of her work as regularly as the tide, inundating the formal music … with a vigor and a specificity from beyond itself" (Clampitt 45). In sum, Clampitt holds Millay too comfortable with conventionally elevated poetic diction, disrespectful of male modernists, too formal (and consequently limited, barred from serious thought), and at best the helpless vessel of an oceanic passion that only partly redeems her.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MILLAY'S MARRIAGE

When Edna St. Vincent Millay finally did marry, it was to Eugen Jan Boissevain, who was an unusual husband for an unusual marriage. Eugen, a Dutchman by birth, had previously been married to Inez Milholland, a suffragette leader and graduate of Vassar. In this marriage, Eugen and Inez had, according to Max Eastman [in Enjoyment of Living, 1948]; taken vows of unpossessive love, which meant complete freedom for both partners, and had maintained their love without possessiveness until Inez's untimely death. This same freedom apparently also characterized the marriage of Eugen and Edna.…

Eugen did everything he could to free Millay from the tasks of normal living in order that she could devote herself to writing poetry. He was not only a husband to her, but a kind of father, mother and nurse-maid—an arrangement that both of them seemed to accept. They accepted, too, childless marriage at Steepletop, their farm in Austerlitz, perhaps because, as Janet Gassman suggests [in Colby Library Quarterly 9, no. 305 (June, 1971)], she considered poetry more important and enduring than any human relationships.

Despite their mutual acceptance of this unconventional marriage and despite their mutual devotion to Millay's poetic achievements, the couple's retreat to pastoral bliss did not remain happy. After the early 1930's, Millay's poetry declined sharply in quality as she began to write about social and political issues unsuited to her lyric gifts. Her health, both physical and emotional, led her to a kind of perpetual nervous exhaustion, probably intensified by excessive drinking.… Although she did manage to write some good poetry again, which is to be found in the posthumous Mine the Harvest, she lived only a bit more than a year after Eugen's death in 1949.

Minot, Walter S. Excerpt from "Millay's 'Ungrafted Tree': The Problem of the Artist as Woman." New England Quarterly 48, no. 2 (June 1975): 266-68.

This attitude recapitulates in salient respects the dismissal John Crowe Ransom offered in "The Poet As Woman" in 1937. While Ransom would not so hastily equate form with incapacity for serious modern matter, his characterization of Millay as unintellectual and best when "sensuous freshness" is at hand anticipates Clampitt. It is only that Ransom's attitude toward women, his assumption that certain characteristics of her writing are essentially feminine, that might trouble a reader bred on contemporary poetry and ready to sympathize with Clampitt's jaundiced view of Millay. Conceding that Millay is an artist, he says, "She is also a woman. No poet ever registered herself more deliberately in that light. She therefore fascinates the male reviewer but at the same time horrifies him a little too. He will probably swing between attachment and antipathy, which may be the very attitudes provoked in him by generic woman in the flesh" (Ransom 76-77). The stereotype of feminine character that accompanies this gender anxiety translates into something very similar to Clampitt's assessment of Millay's writerly virtues and flaws. Here is Ransom's expatiation on the mental stance of women: "A woman lives for love, if we will but project that term to cover all her tender fixations upon natural objects of sense, some of them more innocent and far less reciprocal than men" (77). He concludes with backhanded praise: "man, at best is an intellectualized woman … [woman] is indifferent to intellectuality" (Ransom 77).

The resemblance between Ransom's patently masculinist attitude toward Millay and the conscientiously "contemporary poetic" ethos of Clampitt's review perhaps implies that sexism has gone underground and now appears as an ideology of modernism, at least in the criticism of poetry. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have suggested that male modernism in certain important respects is a reflection of male anxieties provoked by the emergence of women as potent political powers and literary progenitors, "words and works which continually sought to come to terms with, and find terms for, an ongoing battle of the sexes that was set in motion by the late nineteenth-century rise of feminism and the fall of Victorian concepts of 'femininity'" (Gilbert and Gubar, No Man's Landi: xii). Denuded of explicitly anti-female ideas, the aesthetic of male modernism in its recent incarnations continues to propagate the taint of hostility that brought it into existence, ironically even in the mouths of women poets, for example, Clampitt. But if the objections raised against Millay were true, we have now entered a period of reconsideration of literary judgment that wants to rethink the modernist aesthetic (in whatever New Critical or more recent guise) as something other than a perfect culmination of or an obviously unquestionable improvement on all previous or possible future ways of thinking. We might find something has been missed in Millay's poetry that deserves attention and approbation.

Ironically, the objections brought under the aegis of the supposed modernist consensus against Millay are not even true. She is an intellectual writer, complex and ironic, a carefully modern stylist, with a clear sense of the contemporary and the cleanly elegant. And she is a postmodern eclectic user of verse forms archaic and recent, un-benighted by simpleminded wholesale rejections of traditional form.

Millay regarded herself as a modern poet, though she was a formalist. She collaborated with George Dillon on volume of translations from Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. In the preface she authored for it she holds up Baudelaire as the inaugural modern poet. She diagnoses his appeal for modern readers as a matter of a certain "quality of mind" (Dillon xxx). She describes him in terms that make clear the value she places on intellectuality: "This was a poet of the intellect, a lover of order, of perfection in form, deploring superstition, sentimentality and romanticism" (Dillon xxxi). Her discussion of translation recognizes both the difficulties and the limited possibilities of success, with regard to sheer differences in vocabulary as much as differences in canons of versification between French and English. Amid this discussion she lays out her own attitude toward form: "To translate poetry into prose, no matter how faithfully and even subtly the words are reproduced, is to betray the poem. To translate formal stanzas into free verse, free verse into rhymed couplets, is to fail the foreign poet in a very important way" (Dillon vii). The grounds on which she accuses such betrayal is a concept of appropriate and necessary form:

With most poets, the shape of the poem is not an extraneous attribute of it: the poem could not conceivably have been written in any other form. When the image of the poem first rises before the suddenly quieted and intensely agitated person who is to write it, its shadowy bulk is already dimly outlined; it is rhymed or unrhymed; it is trimeter, tetrameter, or pentameter; it is free verse, a sonnet, an epic, an ode, a five-act play. To many poets, the physical character of the poem, its rhythm, its rhyme, its music, the way it looks on the page, is quite as important as the thing they wish to say; to some it is vitally more important. To translate the poetry of E. E. Cummings into the rhymed alexandrines of Molière, would be to do Mr. Cummings no service.

(Dillon vii)

Clearly Millay conceives of poetry as an intrinsically formal art. She accepts the possibility and even emphasizes the necessity of free verse. She is not a stylistic reactionary, but neither does she share the casual dismissal of traditional form as something "brittle," whose "effects … are limited." Free verse is for her one of a variety of technical choices rather than a kind of breakthrough into a bigger world. And given her insistence on the unity of intellectuality and formal perfectionism in the work of Baudelaire, it seems unlikely that she would accept an assumption (such as Clampitt's) that a traditional verse form, such as the sonnet, say, would have "hardly any room for ambiguity of thought or feeling—for anything that critical analysis might take hold of or take apart" (Clampitt 45). A cursory sample of her poetry will, in fact, show just the opposite.

It is customary to begin an examination of Millay's poetics with a look at "Renascence," since its tetrameter rhyming, its easy optimism, and its straining idealism exemplify the stereotyped thoroughly unmodern Millay. A better example of Millay's modernism is "Spring" from Second April :

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
(Millay, Collected Poems   53)

This is free verse: freer than most free verse. The variations from regularity of line length are extreme. The line breaks emphasize or retard syntactic flow. The sentences are severely simple, for the most part. A grammatical break takes place in the first sentence, but the interrogatory appositive nomination of April forces emphasis on the preceding word, "purpose." The only inversion in the poem serves well the sarcastic irony it expresses, with "Not only under the ground are the brains of men / Eaten by maggots." The other images are also flatly unsentimental: the sun hot on the neck, the spikes of the crocus, the word "stickily" pulling the little red leaves out of their sentimental expectation, the mysteriously uncarpeted stairs, and finally, a babbling idiot tossing flowers. (One wonders if he drools!) And the poem is a kind of recognition of the irony of natural beauty for the disaffected subject and of the intellectually unsatisfying condition of human life. Yet this dark recognition is tempered by a hinted temptation simply to enjoy the sheer exuberance of April, a temptation that must be felt even if inevitably foregone by the uninnocent subject.

Even Millay's most simple verses, her most obviously traditional in form and diction, take on interesting resonance against the background of the wars of the sexes posited by Gilbert and Gubar. Consider "The Witch Wife" :

She is neither pink nor pale
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun 'tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of coloured beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.

The meter is a loose, folky, anapestic stanza, rhythmically identical to the limerick, but marked with different rhyming positions:

She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.

The singsong rhythm creates a progressively more compelling cadence, as each stanza puts forth first a pair of lines between which we pause, then a pair without pause—the relentless beat slams on in the third line right into the fourth, skipping and galloping through iambs and anapests.

This chanting seems as unmodern as possible, with modernism's studied insistence on maturity. (Stephen Dedalus may remain stuck in a lifelong adolescent crisis, but he does not return to his nursery). And the archaisms, such as "'tis," belong in a nursery rhyme as easily as in the nineteenth century, not in a poem made after Pound's gospel. The odd formulations hardly reflect a modern purity of expression: How does one learn one's hands and mouth? How can a voice be a string of colored beads or steps to the sea? These seem more like infelicities than salubrious difficulties.

One might try to write off this poem as a bit of juvenile-oriented Gothicism. Only the word "resign" comes out of an unchildish lexicon. But all this "childishness" has a point: the speaker is male, and he is speaking of the intractability of woman. The nursery rhyme thinking is masculine thinking, bewailing the female's nonconformity to his desires, designs, and purposes. He objects that she is "neither pink nor pale," neither an unworldly and protected indoor thing nor weak or fearful. She has acquired power, "learned her hands," in the imagination, "a fairy-tale." And she has acquired both blatantly sexual beauty and the ability to speak, her mouth "on a valentine," which pattern of acquisition suggests the transformation of her objectification in the discourse of romantic love into a position of power to speak.

That she has "more hair than she needs" identifies her as excessive in the male economy—he thinks he knows what she needs, and he knows she has more than he thinks she ought to, the fact that it is only hair notwithstanding. Further, it troubles him that her sign of excess be seen "in the sun." The double significance of the female mouth, as beauty object and as threatening power, recurs in the third and fourth lines of the second stanza, as her voice becomes first "a string of coloured beads" and then the way to oblivion as "steps leading into the sea."

The speaker explains in the last stanza that she loves him "all that she can," a limited affection which he translates into her submission as "her ways to my ways resign." It is notable that he erases her agency, recording no resignation by her, only by her "ways." And he admits the incompatibility of his desire with her, but attributes the incompatibility to her nature rather than her choice, saying "she was not made for any man." He concludes with a frustration that reveals the full measure of domination his quasiinfantile masculine desire demands: "And she never will be all mine."

This ironic use of a childish formalism to make a feminist riposte to masculinist sexual politics does not exhaust Millay's modes of exploiting traditional forms. She is best known as a sonneteer. A glance at one of them will make obvious the degree to which her poetry's virtues are confined to what Clampitt calls "sensuous freshness that slips in and out of her work as regularly as the tide, inundating the formal music … with a vigor and a specificity from beyond itself" (45). Consider this untitled sonnet from The Harp Weaver :

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity,—let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
(Collected Poems   601)

The orientation is intellectual, detached if not passionless. And the graces of this poem are in its intellectuality and wit. Sexual attraction becomes, coolly, "a certain zest." The alliterative pairings of "needs and notions," "stout blood" and "staggering brain," "clarify" and "cloud" lay on a thickly ironic "literaryism." Millay's speaker sarcastically reduces sexual passion to "frenzy" and "frenzy" to "insufficient reason" in a blunt refusal to talk to a former lover. The reversal of the form's generic expectations is complete: A male voice, speaking to and of a female object with transcendent passion and lasting if unhappy devotion, has become a female voice, speaking to and of a male object with untranscendent passion and blithely temporary interest. Here is the patriarchal Petrarchan's nightmare come true, the unfaithful woman who casually uses and loses her lover like a toy, while maintaining an at once appealing and threatening self-possession, with as cerebral a rationale as any male modernist womanizer could boast of.

Now this biting "lightness" may tempt the male modernist (in flight already) to disparage Millay for lack of sobriety if not for lack of intellect. But the volume containing this sonnet also contains the narrative series "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree," which gives the story of a woman returning to manage the passing of her former lover. The nature of the original separation is unclear, but he is now unloved by her, and the tale holds a mood of Hardyian gloom and disillusion. In the final sonnet of the sequence, the female protagonist experiences her distance from her previous engagement with him:

Gazing upon him now, severe and dead,
It seemed a curious thing that she had lain
Beside him many a night in that cold bed,
And that had been which would not be again.
From his desirous body the great heat
Was gone at last, it seemed, and the taut nerves
Loosened forever. Formally the sheet
Set forth for her today those heavy curves
And lengths familiar as the bedroom door.
She was as one who enters, sly and proud,
To where her husband speaks before a crowd,
And sees a man she never saw before—
The man who eats his victuals at her side,
Small, and absurd, and hers: for once, not hers, unclassified.
(622)

Note the Frostian simplicity of "that had been which would not be again." And the simile in the sestet, likening the woman's state at the funeral to that of a woman watching her husband speak publicly and recognizing her alienation from him, subtly inflects the separation imposed by his death with relief. Metrical devices aid this effect, as the accent of the foot hammers on "once" in "for once, not hers" and the delayed completion of the rhyme (the line is seven iambs long) with "unclassified" produces a sense of long-awaited resolution, loading the dry, Latinate word with excruciating emotion.

Millay uses free verse, nursery rhyme, and the sonnet with equal freedom and with a subtle intelligence in working out the gendered politics of the modern. Millay's dramatic writing also argues for her seriousness as a modern writer, beginning with Aria da Capo, her first mature dramatic text.

Aria da Capo was written for and performed by the Provincetown Players and became an immediate success, with many other productions elsewhere soon after, as Millay explains in the author's note in the original Harper edition. It is a blank-verse masque, an expressionist tragic farce, replete with intellectual resonance, even anticipating in its black humor, logical impasses, and plot recursions perhaps Beckett's tramps or Stoppard's (or Pirandello's) caricatures. Two plots interweave in a complex metatheatrical interchange, both deceptively simple: Pierrot and Columbine banter blithely together, love-teasing and social commentary. Pierrot sets himself up first as a lover, then as a student who will "search into all things," then as a modern artist:

pierrot:

… I am become
A painter, suddenly,—and you impress me—
Ah, yes!—six orange bull's eyes, four green pinwheels,
And one magenta jelly-roll, m—the title
As follows: Woman Taking in Cheese from Fire-Escape.
(Millay, Aria da Capo   3)

Subsequently he takes up music "On a new scale.…Without tonality." He becomes a socialist: "I love / Humanity; but I hate people" (4). Columbine offers him a persimmon, which he refuses:

I am become a critic; there is nothing
I can enjoy.… However, set it aside;
I'll eat it between meals.
(7)

The happy repartee is interrupted by Cothurnus, called Masque of Tragedy in the dramatis personae, who runs Pierrot and Columbine off stage. When Pierrot, judging from appearances, says that Cothurnus is sleepwalking, Cothurnus replies with black irony, "I never sleep" (8). Cothurnus coaches two new characters, Thrysis and Corydon, through a rehearsal that slips in and out of its dramatic illusion, periodically prompted by Cothurnus from the playbook he holds, and occasionally interrupted by ejaculations from Pierrot and Columbine offstage. Thyrsis and Corydon initially resist Cothurnus's direction, complaining (as had Pierrot and Columbine) that this scene should come later in the play. They raise other objections, saying that they cannot build the wall their scene requires with only the tissue paper available on stage (though that is exactly what they will do). Thyrsis sums up unwittingly the project of the play as a whole when he says, "We cannot act / A tragedy with comic properties!" (10)

Thereafter unfolds a tragedy with comic properties, both in the sense that this tragedy has comic properties in general and in the specific sense of comic stage-properties: the aforementioned tissue, a bowl of confetti, and so on. In this tragedy, Thyrsis and Corydon are two shepherds meditatively tending their common flock. In proper bucolic fashion Corydon suggests they compose a song together. The subject of the song he proposes is "a lamb that thought himself a shepherd" (12). The hubris of the lamb will turn out to be the hubris of Thyrsis and Corydon. Thyrsis forgets his line and Cothurnus prompts him with "I know a game worth two of that" (12). Thyrsis picks up the thread of the script and suggests they build a wall instead of composing a song. They build a wall of tissue, separating the sheep of one from the sheep of the other. Each grows jealous of his own "property" as defined by the wall and envious of the other's. They mistrust each other, prompted by Cothurnus, who supplies at several junctures the forgotten line, "How do I know it isn't a trick?" (14) Thyrsis will not allow Corydon's sheep to drink the water which is only on Thyrsis's side of the wall. They both want to stop mistrusting each other but cannot. Corydon discovers jewels on his side of the wall, and Thyrsis offers to trade water for the sheep for jewels, but Corydon refuses. He claims to have given up his life as shepherd in favor of that of a merchant. And he becomes ambitious: "And if I set my mind to it / I dare say I could be an emperor" (21). Corydon contemplates the luxuries and fame that his great wealth can bring him, ignoring Thyrsis's warning that his sheep will die. Now, Thyrsis discovers a poisonous-rooted plant on his side of the wall, and when Corydon finally becomes thirsty, Thyrsis agrees to trade water for a necklace of Corydon's jewels. Thyrsis poisons Corydon with a bowl of offered water; Corydon in turn strangles Thyrsis to death as he dies himself of the poisoned water.

Cothurnus hides the bodies under the table at which Pierrot and Columbine had sat and calls them back on stage to do their scene again. Pierrot protests that the audience will not stand for the bodies to be left on stage while the farce is played. Cothurnus assures him that the audience will forget, though the bodies remain in plain sight. Pierrot and Columbine take up their exchange exactly where they had begun it, wondering what day it is, as if nothing had happened—or as if this state was implicit in the empty stage at the beginning of the play. The various postures of artist, socialist, critic, and so on, adopted by Pierrot as he verbally abuses Columbine, seem now to have been predicated on the tragedy of Thyrsis and Corydon having always already) happened. Their gendered byplay cohabits with the primal violence of equals entangled in deadly hostilities the origin of which they cannot remember, but which evolve out of a substitution of "a game worth two of that" for the collaborative production of a song. The song, were it possible to produce it, would be an admonitory one about a lamb that thinks it is a shepherd. Such a lamb among lambs is an equal with a delusion of superiority; and this same delusion is doubly present in the fatal competition of Thyrsis and Corydon.

It is hard to misread the intellectual complexity of this little play in light of later absurdist, existential, and minimalist drama in this century. The rest of Millay's dramatic writing may deserve a fuller examination on its own merits. But Millay also exploits the possibilities of dramatic polyvocality in works not intended for the stage. In 1937, the year John Crowe Ransom was damning her with faint praise for the feminine unintellectuality of her poetry, she published Conversation at Midnight. It is a closet drama of drawing-room conversation, the conversants exclusively male and educated but otherwise diverse enough: a stock-broker, a painter, a writer of short stories, a communist poet, a Catholic priest, a wealthy and liberal Euro-American aristocrat, an ad man, and a butler and chauffeur. The play explores the sometimes intractable differences of opinion between atheist and believer, communist and conservative, communist and liberal, and so on, spiced with discussions of "masculine" pursuits like hunting quail or women. The irony is thick.

The exclusion of women from the dramatis personae, plausible though it may be for the play's pretext, demands some explanation as the work of Millay, otherwise so committed to including a woman's view. I believe that one of Millay's untitled sonnets sums up nicely her sense of the literary politics of gender in a way that can shed some light on this exclusion:

Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!
Give back my book and take my kiss instead.
Was it my enemy or my friend I heard,
"What a big book for such a little head!"
Come, I will show you now my newest hat,
And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink!
Oh, I shall love you still, and all of that.
I never again shall tell you what I think.
I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly;
You will not catch me reading any more;
I shall be called a wife to pattern by;
And some day when you knock and push the door,
Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,
I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.
(Collected Poems   591)

The simple plot allegorizes the relationship of the woman writer to a male-dominated literary tradition as a marriage of woman and man. Her voice threatens revenge. She demands the return of her book, for which we may read something like control of the poetic imaginary. She offers him her kiss in exchange, knowing his presuppositions about her function as object of his desire. She questions, half-seriously it seems, whether he is her enemy or her friend, allowing that his answer may not be the same as hers. She reveals the events leading up to his theft of the book: he insulted her intelligence, presuming that her "little head" (read "small intelligence") and the "big book" (read, perhaps, "writing-in-general," the category of the literary itself) ill-matched. She offers to pose for him and show off what he might consider a more appropriate concern for her "little head," her latest item of millinery. She reassures him of her love casually, as if the assurance were unimportant as well as almost unneeded, "and all of that." Having lulled him, she becomes sarcastic, though we expect he may not catch her tone as she announces a campaign of deception, in which she will be "sweet and crafty" in concealing her interest in the "big book" from him. Finally, perhaps once she has that book in her possession, she will disappear from his domain, presumably into her own.

Reading this poem as a microcosm of Millay's attitudes about the situation of woman with respect to man and to the literary, this poem explains how she could want to write a serious bit of social commentary in verse and voice it entirely in male characters. In conforming to controlling expectations of the male-dominated literary tradition—that only men take up subjects like communism and liberalism, let alone quail hunting—Millay inscribes the female presence in its very absence: she doesn't let him see her reading.

Millay's campaign of deception may explain her broadly eclectic formalism also. [Conversation at Midnight ], like Millay's work as a whole, makes evenhanded use of both traditional (even archaic) versification and free verse. Since both the tradition and the modernist "revolution" in verse technique are (or at least were for her) patently male-dominated affairs, her willingness to write in either formal or free-verse mode, her refusal to take sides, may betray a covert motive to get control of the "big book" rather than be read to by a self-important male who decides what she can understand with her "little head."

"Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word"

also allegorizes the relationship between Millay and her recent critical readers, theorists and poet alike. One way or another they treat her as somehow defective, citing as flaws her very strategies of deceptively occupying the expected positions in masculine poetics. They think she is out of her league up against contemporary feminists and canonical poets. They patronize her and take her book away. She offers, and they don't understand why, her flamboyantly feminized kiss and her thoughtful silence. Once we recognize her as a resourcefully ingenious and independent-minded poet, she has possession of the "big book," and they can go whistle.

Note

1. Jane Stanbrough, in perhaps the earliest of the feminist critical "recuperations" of Millay, characterizes Millay's entire poetics as inhabited by a congenital stance of tragic female vulnerability. In fact, I would not want to disagree with Stanbrough that Millay's "profound insight into her self's inevitable capitulation … makes Millay ultimately so vulnerable and her poetry so meaningful" (199), though I can imagine how this view might be seen as ultimately itself a capitulation to John Crowe Ransom's ill-taken dismissal of Millay as "the poet as Woman." As capitulation and recapitulation may be rusing signs of defeat, I can't help finding a bit more to Millay's acquisition of the dominant masculine poetics. (Even vulnerability, if it were all she were about, and it isn't, can be a weapon.) The most recent reassessment, in the third volume of Gilbert and Gubar's No Man's Land, Letters from the Front, traces the historic rewriting of Millay by a masculinist critical tradition with much more sense of Millay's power.

Works Cited

Clampitt, Amy. "Two Cheers for Prettiness: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Selected Poems: The Centenary Edition, Edited and with an Introduction by Colin Falck." New Republic 6 Jan., 13 Jan. 1992.

Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.

Dillon, George, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, trans. Flowers of Evil: From the French of Charles Baudelaire with the Original Texts and a Preface by Miss Millay. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936.

Fried, Debra. "Andromeda Unbound: Gender and Genre in Millay's Sonnets." Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay. Ed. William B. Thesing. New York: G. K. Hall, 1993.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 1, The War of the Words. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988.

——. No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 3, Letters from the Front. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994.

——. Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.

Hacker, Marilyn. Collected Poems. New York: Harper & Row, 1956.

——. Taking Notice. New York: Knopf, 1980.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Aria da Capo: A Play in One Act. New York: Harper, 1920.

——. Collected Poems. Evanston, IL: Harper & Row, 1956.

——. Conversation at Midnight. New York: Harper & Row, 1937.

Ransom, John Crowe. The World's Body. New York: Scribner's, 1938.

Stanbrough, Jane. "Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Language of Vulnerability." In Gilbert and Gubar, Shakespeare's Sisters. 183-99.

Walker, Cheryl. Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.