Edna St. Vincent Millay, that once-towering literary figure, was less than five feet tall and only eighteen years old when she wrote the 214-line philosophical poem, “Renascence,” that would make her famous. one evening, her enchanting public reading of it (she was a fine elocutionist and amateur actress, with an accent that was said to sound vaguely British but like nobody else’s), in conjunction with her performance of songs of her own composing, induced a listener, Caroline B. Dow, to raise money to send this girl from rural Maine to Vassar. She inspired loyalty. Later, in Greenwich Village, she became the idol not only of the critics but of a generation of Americans who saw her as the embodiment of the flapper era; they learned by heart her defiant sonnets addressed to the lovers she had let go, few of whom seemed to blame her seriously or for long. When she died, at the age of fifty-eight, in 1950, she had produced what would constitute a Collected Poems of over seven hundred pages, as well as translations, plays, and an opera libretto. And yet her passing went barely remarked in the literary journals. Today, although her Collected Poems remains in print, she is often regarded as something of a joke, and is denied even a token appearance in most of the respected anthologies.


Millay’s story is one of our century’s most extreme cautionary tales about the whims of critical favor. In his memoirs, her friend Max Eastman judged her sonnet sequence “Epitaph for the Race of Man” to be “the only poem in the language since Milton that can be compared in mental boldness with Dante and Lucretius.” A more reliable critic, Edmund Wilson (who was, however, desperately in love with her for years and one of her unsuccessful suitors in marriage), called her “one of the only poets writing in English in our time who have attained anything like the stature of great literary figures.” Likewise poets and critics with no personal attachment to her regarded her highly indeed: Edward Davison put her in Robert Frost’s league, and Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman returned her admiration.


Millay’s story is one of our century’s most extreme cautionary tales about the whims of critical favor.



Now, for the centenary of her birth, comes a slim new selection of her poems, edited by Colin Falck.1 The time ought to be auspicious for re-evaluating and at least partly restoring Millay’s reputation, given the recent surge of interest both in women poets and in traditional poetic forms. Millay was primarily, unabashedly, a musical and a conventional poet. She could write sonnets that were so Shakespearean—not only in rhyme scheme but in syntax, idiom, and metaphor—that they verged on parody. But if the rise of modernism, with its reverence for the impersonal and the opaque, its concentration on the poem as a visual rather than an aural object, its taste for the unexpected image, had begun eroding Millay’s following as early as the 1930s, Falck’s edition makes clear that she did have (off and on) experimental tendencies. Her first free-verse poem, “Spring,” opens her collection Second April, published when she was twenty-nine—when, that is, her professional career was a decade old but that of most poets has barely started. And some of the unrhymed, or rhymed but unmetered, poems remain among her most appealing.


In hindsight, it seems nearly inevitable that Millay would be ill-served by the anthologists. She was easy to read, but hard to categorize or excerpt. Technically, her interests were so diffuse (one poem could sound like Keats and another like T.S. Eliot) that she stood, as Allen Tate remarked, poised between two eras. Nor could any one Millay poem be read, necessarily, as wholly of the nineteenth century or of the twentieth. Although her love poems are usually conventional in their forms, and often downright antiquated in their locutions, they convey messages rare in the genre, even today, and rarer still—as the critic James Gray noted—in poetry by women. Constancy in love was hardly ever Millay’s goal; she never complained of being seduced or misled. Her own clear-headedness about the likelihood of parting often consoled her more than loving or being loved. (Some of her work, indeed, could be characterized less as love poetry than as lust poetry; one sonnet ends, “I find this frenzy insufficient reason / For conversation when we meet again.”) Even when she suffered, the anguish she bared and heightened like a romantic poet could be mixed with a very modern irony or detachment that approached cruelty. A clever epigrammatist as well, Millay surely has to be the only poet in our literature who has been compared both to Milton and to Dorothy Parker. To reproduce only the short—whether sardonic or sweet—lyrics in a sampling of her work would be to ignore the trajectory of her ambition: she wrote long, fierce sonnet sequences on great themes—lost love, death, the threatened survival of mankind.

These long sequences, noble of spirit and markedly uneven in execution, point to another difficulty in the preservation of Millay’s work. Falck, who in an effort to redress critical neglect has quite rashly called her “the finest American lyricist of the twentieth century” (surely not better than Frost? Roethke? Bogan? Wilbur?), finds it possible to retain just four of the eighteen sonnets that make up “Epitaph for the Race of Man” and only five of the fifty-two in “Fatal Interview.” The 162 pages of this new edition are insufficient to do Millay justice. And yet, paradoxically, they are plentiful enough to show us that she often went on too long.


In a late sonnet, she began by vowing “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines,” and then proceeded to evoke images of constraint (“pious rape,” she rather forcedly called it) for the next thirteen. But sometimes Chaos asks not to become a sonnet; it wants to be confined to ten lines, or four. Millay savored the sharpness of concision in her light verse. The pint-sized “Grown-up” has the right proportions for its funny complaint:


Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?


Despite Millay’s frequent success with the sonnet—a form many poets find too short for their purposes—in her hands it could look less cramped than padded, as a sonnet from “Fatal Interview” illustrates:


Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with

breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured
    bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack oflove alone.
It may well be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for
     release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.


A satisfying, old-fashioned poem. Yet who isn’t disappointed by that fourth line —“And rise and sink and rise and sink again”? The words needn’t be repeated to convey the repetition of the action; they’re fillers until we arrive at a rhyme for “rain.” And the last six lines set up a straw man— how would you, practically speaking, trade the memory of love for food?—only to knock it down in the space allotted. It would be another poem entirely (just six lines long, with one line that floats unrhymed) but not necessarily an inferior one if the reader could take a scalpel to it:


Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with

breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured
    bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with
    death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.


(Of course, we readers “edit” our favorite poems all the time. If we attempt to learn one by heart but always drop a particular line, or rewrite it unintentionally, this may be a sign that the poet is more at fault than we are.)


The ease with which another sonnet from “Fatal Interview” offers itself up for memorization may be a delusory measure of its merit. But I want to reproduce it here also—because it does not appear in Falck’s selection, and because it is my favorite of Millay’s love sonnets. It illustrates how well she could ramify a theme within the form’s restrictions:


Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this

one went.
Some nights of apprehension and hot
     weeping
I will confess; but that’s permitted me;
Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping
Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.
If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.
Should I outlive this anguish—and men do—
I shall have only good to say of you.


“Kings in a tumbrel” gives a hint of the hokey medievalisms Millay was prey to, and the bird-in-the-cage metaphor, like most of her images, is hardly novel. Today, a woman poet wouldn’t dream of writing “and men do” when she means “and people do.” But the genuineness of the feeling outstrips the conventionalities.


Edmund Wilson, in his touching memoir of Millay in The Shores of Light, comments that the “Fatal Interview” sequence is the first poem in which Millay portrays a lover leaving her before she is quite ready to be left. Perhaps only someone who had had as much practice as Millay in falling in and out of love could have played all the notes one hears in these fourteen lines. She shifts from resignation to pride, from helpless grief to self-forgiveness, and back again to pride before closing in a couplet that embraces at once pain, hope, and generosity. The flippancy and self-regard of some of the earliest work has metamorphosed, in a poem she published at the age of thirty-nine, into courage.


Compassion for others, for the common man, informs some of Millay’s clumsiest work.



What she is proudest of here, notably, is that she never sought “at the cost of words I value highly” to extend the love affair beyond its natural lifespan. It was words—her infatuation with “speaking well” in both senses—that Millay clung to more constantly than she did her lovers. Words offered a musical enchantment but also the opportunity to distance oneself, to make generalizations, to be philosophical (though not at all intellectual). This most personal of poets had her impersonal side. As Wilson wrote, Millay did not “give the impression that personality much mattered for her … when she came to write about her lovers, she gave them so little individuality that it was usually . . . impossible to tell which man she was writing about.” (An early sonnet opened with the mildly shocking disclaimer, “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why / I have forgotten . . .”) And choosing the right words was also an exercise of individual freedom—the pursuit of which was a unifying theme for nearly all her poems.


The theme had appeared as early as “Renascence,” in which, lying on the grass alone, surrounded by “three long mountains and a wood,” and looking up at the sky, she experiences the boundlessness of the natural world as an occasion for claustrophobia:


I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest …


What saves her from suffocation, too many lines later, is a happy recognition not of the world’s grandeur but (remember the author is eighteen!) of her own. To the end of her life Millay was selfish, restless, unwilling to be confined; what mitigated the selfishness was her heartfelt wish that other people be selfish too. This sentiment—in its way, a form of compassion—was most evident in the love poems but also surfaced elsewhere, as in the fine ballad “On the Wide Heath,” where a “weary traveller” (the cliché is unfortunate), returning to an unhappy family, never considers any other alternative; he will go


Home to the worn reproach, the disagreeing,

The shelter, the stale air; content to be
Pecked at, confined, encroached upon,—
               it being
     Too lonely, to be free.


(One thinks of Millay’s musical sense as mainly a business of glissandos and soft-pedaling. But here she pecks at her lines with commas, producing a staccato effect that nicely echoes the encroachments in the traveler’s life.)


Such compassion for others, for the common man, informs some of Millay’s clumsiest work—a poem about Sacco and Vanzetti, for whom she protested, or her propaganda poems of the Second World War, which may have done the most damage to her reputation. And even in her most admirable work addressed to the human condition, the “Epitaph for the Race of Man” of 1934, she could be as lumbering as the dinosaur that “at morning made his way / And dropped his dung upon the blazing dew.” But then, within the same sequence, she could write this nearly perfect beauty of a sonnet, which ought to be served up whole:


Observe how Miyonoshita cracked in two
And slid into the valley; he that stood
Grinning with terror in the bamboo wood
Saw the earth heave and thrust its bowels

through
The hill, and his own kitchen slide from
    view,
Spilling the warm bowl ofhis humble food
Into the lap ofhorror; mark how lewd
This cluttered gulf,—’twas here his paddy
    grew.
Dread and dismay have not encompassed
    him;
The calm sun sets; unhurried and aloof
Into the riven village falls the rain;
Days pass; the ashes cool; he builds again
His paper house upon oblivion’s brim,
And plants the purple iris in its roof.


The immediacy of the scene is all the more striking from a poet who tended to steal her images from centuries past. “Observe” is the poem’s opening instruction, whereas so often Millay urges us chiefly to feel. Here the village under the mountain cracks in two and slides into the following line, which itself cracks in two (by means of a semi-colon). While the brief earthquake requires a full eight lines to describe—time being protracted in moments of fear—the stunned aftermath (“days pass; the ashes cool”) is a matter of five words. Millay was well-served here by the Petrarchan rhyme scheme (obviating the need for a conclusive-sounding rhyming couplet) and by the sonnet’s placement in the middle of its sequence. The purple iris can grow, in its brave and unlikely way, from the new roof without being weighted down by summarizing commentary. If we wince at the posingly poetic “mark how lewd this cluttered gulf” and “’twas,” these words alone don’t gravely mar the poem’s masterly effects elsewhere.


A poet of my acquaintance who has published many books and won well-deserved acclaim says that his ambition is to become a minor poet. He means that a poet of this age or any other will be fortunate indeed, should feel honored in advance, if a few of his poems are preserved in the anthologies a hundred years hence. The major poet typically has not only a largeness of spirit, a breadth of subject matter and tone, but a reliable level of technical competency —usually, of course, brilliance. Even if the range of the oeuvre remains narrow, the relatively consistent quality of execution is essential. Readers may choose to avoid a particular poem in a sequence, a whole sequence, a book, that decade in a poet’s life when he took a wrong turn. But when rereading a single poem, we had better not very often feel (as we do with Millay) that we still want to avert our eyes from lines five through eight, or from the first two feet of line eleven, however breathtaking the last three feet may be.


Edna St. Vincent Millay is a fine minor poet, in my view. The unlikelihood of her winning out over the centuries as anything more than that, as someone whose poems generally can be marveled at in every detail, should be no cause for sorrow among her admirers, even those of us who deplore the paltry number of great women poets in English. It’s the inconsistency of quality in Millay’s poems, not so much among them but within them, that makes any selection especially chancy, and bound to disappoint somewhere. As Colin Falck remarks in his introduction (the same introduction in which he calls her “one of the most skillful technicians in the whole history of English poetry”):


Apostrophes and exclamations, stylized lyric posturings, cutely traditional elisions, poetical inversions of grammar and word-order, personifications of love or death or beauty, nursery-rhyme metrics, slightly-too-facile epigrams, more-than-slightly-too-facile metaphors or symbols, all leap from the page for the casual reader of Millay’s Collected Lyrics or Collected Sonnets.


And we find ourselves chuckling, too, at her anachronistic diction in verses where she is dead serious. What can be done with a poet who writes, in 1931, “Far liefer would I think / Upon my dear”? Even in Falck’s edition, which skillfully excises most of the offensive poems, we’re left with dreadful single lines like “What fumy wits these modern wags expose.”


But Millay affords real pleasures, and one of them is the surprise, in a selection that liberally represents her technique at its most modern, of how wholly satisfyingly she could write in lines of unpredictable lengths, in random rhyme, or in no rhyme at all. Her first experimentation with free verse, or at least freer verse, predates by a few years her marriage (in 1923—the same year that she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry) to a Dutch businessman, Eugen Boissevain, with whom she would soon escape Greenwich Village to buy a farmhouse in Austerlitz, New York. In moving from the city to the country, from romantic whirlwind to commitment (it was a devoted marriage, though not at all, to judge from the poems, a sexually faithful one), Millay appeared also to have moved into a quadrant of the brain that favored greater emotional detachment. Living among animals and plant life offered her distance, even when she was dealing with tragic themes.


The title poem of her first book after the move to Austerlitz, The Buck in the Snow, initially recounts the death of a buck (“his wild blood scalding the snow”) in six irregular lines, each ending with rhymes on “snow.” Then the one-note music, relentless like death, opens up to accommodate the fragility of what remains:


How strange a thing is death, bringing to his
   knees, bringing to his antlers
The buck in the snow.
How strange a thing,—a mile away by now,
   it may be,
Under the heavy hemlocks that as the
   moments pass
Shift their loads a little, letting fall a feather
   of snow—
Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of
   the doe.


The assonance and consonance (“heavy hemlocks,” “a little, letting fall”), the continued rhyme on “snow,” all show Millay’s years of apprenticeship in traditional forms. But the sureness of hand with which she combines this music with unrhymed lines and unscannable rhythms is the poem’s true achievement. The padded feel of so much of Millay’s metrical verse has disappeared; lines end when they need to. Freed from the tyranny of the iamb, Millay instinctively modernized her diction, and, in so doing, lowered the temperature of her sensibility. Life, as it looks out from the eyes of an animal, is “attentive,” but not grief-stricken; snow falls, but not tears.


The loose correspondence between freer verse and a more detached treatment of subject matter persisted throughout Millay’s life, although she continued heavily to favor her earlier, formal mode. In the posthumous Mine the Harvest of 1954, a poem called “Armenonville” demonstrates that even when writing about that least objective topic, human love, she could eschew both the coldness and the torment that were her mainstays for a tone of gentleness and mild amusement. The poem’s more muted emotional effects seem at least partly the result of a liberation of technique. Two lovers sit at a café table near a lake in the Bois de Boulogne; the waiters leave them “blissfully alone.” And then


There swam across the lake, as I looked aside,

     avoiding
Your eyes for a moment, there swam from
    under the pink and red begonias
A small creature; I thought it was a water-rat;
    it swam very well,
In complete silence, and making no ripples
    at all …


The tortured confessional poems of recent decades lead us to suspect that the water-rat is coming into view in order to symbolize something really ghastly in the lovers’ relationship. But no, “I thought it was a water-rat,”—and so it is; and not only that, the rat swims very well. The long, enjambed lines, the prosaic rhythms, the reverence for the humblest of animals, fleetingly put one in mind of Marianne Moore, who (five years Millay’s senior) would usually appear to inhabit another poetic planet. When, at the end of the poem, Millay returns her attention to her lover’s conversation, “truly I did not know / Whether you had been asking or telling.” Interestingly, as in most of her love poems, it is Millay and not her lover who loses attention first; but this time the competitor for her affections is a water-rat, and only for a moment. Its effortless progress, as liquid as her lines, serves as a (perhaps unintentional) emblem of the solitary freedom she had always sought in her poems—for herself, and for others.


Poetry was not merely the ｅxpression of Millay’s defiance; it was life itself.



Death, the final encroachment, came to Millay barely a year after that of her husband. Friends surmised that his sudden passing hastened hers, of a heart attack; in any case, in later years she had suffered from ill health, alcoholism, and depression. She had written some worthy elegies and meditations on mortality, finding consolation not in the Christian afterlife but in her own irrational defiance. The most moving of these poems, “Dirge Without Music,” concludes,


Down, down, down into the darkness of the
    grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the
    kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the
    brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not
    resigned.



Poetry was not merely the ｅxpression of her defiance; it was life itself. In a letter to Edmund Wilson in 1946, after a nervous breakdown which had left her unable to write poetry for two years, she attributed even her silence to work she had written before, her war propaganda: “… [T]here is nothing on this earth which can so much get on the nerves of a good poet, as the writing of bad poetry … I was in the hospital a long time.”


And poetry cured her too, or at least made life bearable; she recovered by memorizing long-dead masters. Her letter, for all its sorrow, sparkles with boasting:


I have just finished learning by heart Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy … I have also learned by heart The Eve of St. Agnes and Lamia … I have learned by heart, of Shelley, not only To the West Wind … but also the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty—a devil to learn by heart. Anyway, I have them all now. And what evil thing can ever again even brush me with its wings?


Nothing more evil, for a poet, than to be forgotten—and Millay was a poet whose readership had once learned her by heart as well. How often in the letter she speaks of having “learned by heart”—probably an inevitable phrase from the love poet who implored years before, “Pity me that the heart is slow to learn / What the swift mind beholds at every turn.” However limited the uses posterity may have for this minor poet, surely the swiftness and thoroughness with which she was unlearned by the critics at midcentury was not deserved. Falck doesn’t reprint here “The Poet and His Book,” a lament about the ephemerality of literary fame (and to heap irony upon irony, he was right not to—it’s too long by half). But a few lines from it may underscore just how acutely the young Millay foresaw the dangers ahead: 


Stranger, pause and look;

 From the dust ofages
Lift this little book,

Turn the tattered pages,
 Read me, do not let me die!

  1.  Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems, The Centenary Edition, edited and with an introduction by Colin Falck; foreword by Richard Eberhart; HarperCollins, 162 pages, $18.


  


Mary Jo Salter is the author of Open Shutters: Poems (Knopf).




This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 10 Number 8, on page 23
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