The New Criterion

Not so many years ago, the favorite poet of sophisticated high-schoolers and typical college students was Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950). One had a mental image of a redheaded, fair-skinned imp of a girl from an obscure Maine background, having scandalous affairs at Vassar and in Greenwich Village—a poet garlanded by age twenty, a bohemian free spirit dedicated to living the artist’s life, and, of course, a looker.

This image was true enough and helped the cause of Millay’s poetry. The poetry returned the favor by fostering the image. Love affairs leap from these pages, immortalized in jaunty, unsentimental, devil-may-care poems that were formal, richly rhymed, musical, frequently in the sonnet form, which had the cachet of poets from Shakespeare to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

As a young girl, Millay—or Vincent, as she liked to be called—was lovely, though perhaps no more so than her two younger sisters. She did not age particularly well, but that did not stop her affairs, any more than her marriage in 1923 did after its first few years. In her older age—dying at fifty-eight, she never got to be really old—she was one of those sad, faded beauties whom the poet Frederic Prokosch, in his impudent memoir Voices, all too tellingly evokes.

It may be that she died too late. Would Sylvia Plath’s reputation, poetry aside, be what it is had she died later, and not from suicide? Still, dying young does not work for everyone. Elinor Wylie, as good a poet and as lovely a woman as Millay, died at forty-three, and is today scarcely remembered. In the Library of America’s two-volume anthology, American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Wylie rates fourteen entries, Millay, twenty-eight. Of course, names may have something to do with it. A saintly middle name, and a full name that rolls off the tongue, function as a potent aide-mémoire. Conversely, consider Adelaide Crapsey, a fine minor poet doomed by her name, unhelped by death at thirty-six.

The American Poets Project is a much smaller-size series of the Library of America; its first volume, Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems (2003), was edited by the poet J. D. McClatchy. There is an introduction followed by some 210 pages of poetry, plus biographical and textual notes. Included are the one-act pacifist verse play Aria da Capo, selections from Millay’s Baudelaire translations, excerpts from the libretto for Deems Taylor’s opera The King’s Henchman, once widely hailed and now forgotten. Here, too, is the eighteen-sonnet sequence Epitaph for the Race of Man, and the fifty-two-sonnet one Fatal Interview. There are also excerpts from Conversation at Midnight, described by McClatchy as a “1937 book-length sequence [that] alternates poems in the voices of six men over after-dinner drinks,” which I consider poor, and part of the 1942 propaganda poem The Murder of Lidice, which I consider embarrassing. All in all, however, McClatchy’s choices show good judgment.

Edna Millay was a love poet, a phenomenon not nearly so common as one might suppose. Robert Graves, in one of his prefaces, remarked that the proper subjects of lyric poetry were love and death. But neither he nor any other poet could stick strictly to such an agenda. The Selected Poems are indeed mostly about love, with also a number of elegies, some of them for Elinor Wylie. To be sure, for Millay “love” frequently meant sex, though not in the shy-making detail embraced by some later woman poets. As McClatchy rightly points out, this is not confessional poetry in the Plath-Sexton mode, though both those poets studied and admired Millay. Laid bare in sensitive detail are feelings; physical details, embarrassing or not, are largely absent.

Prosody undoubtedly contributes to the eclipse of Millay’s reputation. Her poetry contains archaisms and poeticisms in an age in which the Moderns—think Eliot, Pound, Auden, Stevens, etc.—came to the fore. Millay’s vocabulary and frequent inversions helped to doom her. But innovation, modernity, is not all that matters. Perception, attitude, imagery, rhythm, and cadence deserve their share of attention and esteem.

I shall concentrate here on the sonnets. Take this one, from her third collection, Second April (1921):

Only until this cigarette is ended
A little moment at the end of all,
While on the floor the quiet ashes fall,
And in the firelight to a lance extended,
Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,
The broken shadow dances on the wall,
I will permit my memory to recall
The vision of you, by all my dreams attended.
And then adieu,—farewell!—the dream is done.
Yours is a face of which I can forget
The colour and the features, every one.
The words not ever, and the smile not yet;
But in your day this moment is the sun
Upon a hill, after the sun has set.

 

A perfect Petrarchan sonnet, this. What is said here? That nostalgia about a past love may not exceed the duration of a cigarette. The choice of a cigarette as timer is telling: one of the briefest of all indulgences, and one that, though not yet seen as carcinogenic, was, in some views, a minor vice. The poet is sitting by her fireplace, a romantic spot, listening to jazz, which may suggest nightclubs, wild dancing, fast living. Letting the ashes fall on the floor indicates insouciance. That the cigarette casts a lance-like shadow conveys a certain vehemence, but a broken shadow is ephemeral. The shadow dances to the music. Is it because the hand that casts it sways to the beat? Or is it that the fire is flickering, a reminder of the intensity and impermanence of passion? Permitting one’s memory, i.e., controlling it, shows the firmness of the terminating resolve.

The “colour” (note the affected British spelling) and the features of the face—which here represent the sensual element, are the most evanescent. The smiles—the lover’s charm or gaiety—linger a bit longer. It is only the words that will remain. That Millay’s lovers included (simultaneously) such literary figures as Floyd Dell, Edmund Wilson, John Peale Bishop, and Arthur Davison Ficke may explain why the lover’s words will never be forgotten, or it’s simply that to a poet words are more memorable than anything else. Finally, the lovely closing image that takes us out into nature: the sun on a hill after the sun has set. There is a progression from the glowing cigarette tip to the fire in the hearth, to the sun on the hilltop—all going, soon to be gone. Is there a sadness under the nonchalance?

Next, a sonnet from the first collection, Renascence and Other Poems (1917):

If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
That you were gone, not to return again—
Read from the back-page of a paper, say,
Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at the corner of this avenue
And such a street (so are the papers filled)
A hurrying man, who happened to be you,
At noon today had happened to be killed—
I should not cry aloud,—I could not cry
Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place—
I should but watch the station lights rush by
With a more careful interest on my face;
Or raise my eyes and read with greater care
Where to store furs or how to treat the hair.

Here we have Millay’s mastery of the other type of sonnet, the Shakespearean. Striking is the fine variety of rhyming sounds—dark, bright, long syllables, short syllables, diphthongs—greatly enhancing the cadence of the verse.

Startlingly, this poignant lyric does not contain a single simile or metaphor. It consists suspensefully of a single sentence toward whose climactic resolution the mind races. If in the previously discussed sonnet the poet’s coolness and promiscuity prevented wallowing in nostalgia, here Millay proclaims her control even in a current relationship; in the event of the lover’s death, she would not show her grief in public. Could this also be a warning to the lover of the moment not to expect excessive shows of emotion, however hot the affair?

This is the aristocratic stoicism of the elitist sensibility rather than the boast of the unflappable flapper. Note the near-tautology of “gone, not to return again,” stressing the finality of death. Usually, Millay’s living lovers, whoever dumped whom, would be unable to break off completely. There were almost always returns for more, which was sometimes—rarely—granted.

Observe the skillful use of repetition. “A hurrying man, who happened to be you,/ At noon today had happened to be killed …” It vividly conveys the gradual dawning of the truth on a furtive reader. Then the progression: “I should not cry—I could not cry …” How dramatic that intensification from “should not” to “could not” and, later, from “more careful” to “greater care.” Millay, an accomplished, sometimes professional, actress and a competent playwright, knew how to tell a story in a true dramatic mode.

I will not address the two most famous sonnets—“Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare” and “Oh, Sleep Forever in the Latmian Cave”—which I find overrated and anthologized to death. Instead, consider No. 30 from the fifty-two-sonnet sequence Fatal Interview (1931), and see how Millay has evolved. These poems were written to George Dillon, a twenty-two-year-old poet with whom the thirty-six-year-old married Millay fell madly in love when he attended one of her poetry readings in Chicago. To quote McClatchy’s introduction, “He was all profile, weak-willed, shyly homosexual. Millay was smitten at once, and by next afternoon had written him a sonnet that begins ‘This beast that rends me in the sight of all …’” That became No. 2 in the sequence. Herewith No. 30:

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 can not 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.
It well may 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.

It seems to me that Millay had only three serious, perdurable loves. The first was for the poet Arthur Davison Ficke, booster, mentor, and lifelong friend, with whom she had the briefest, lightning affair, which turned into an enduring amorous correspondence. Eventually Ficke and his rightfully jealous wife settled down as neighbors of Millay and her infinitely complaisant husband in a friendship lasting unto Ficke’s death.

The second was Edna’s husband, the Dutch-American Eugen Boissevain, businessman and, later, gentleman farmer at Steepletop, a farm at Austerlitz, N.Y., the couple’s last home. Eugen was an overindulgent father figure, caretaker and factotum to Edna, spoiling her rotten, tolerating any affair she might have. He would discreetly make himself scarce, including leaving Paris when she wanted to be there alone with George Dillon, her third and greatest love. He would even invite George to Steepletop, and do everything to befriend him. For Edna, Eugen was a love that turned into lasting, deeply dependent affection. His death left her completely unmoored and, a year later, dead.

“Love Is Not All” is, as it were, the negative to Mrs. Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee” sonnet, but it, too, turns positive in the end. It begins in the old Millay mode, poohpoohing love; but the things that seem greater than love, for which love might be yielded up, become mightier from line to line, and could be presumed to prevail. But then comes the last-verse turnabout, cautious and rueful, yet an amor vincit omnia.

The structure is an ingeniously alliterative, masterly progression through various forms of repetition. First the “not”s and “nor”s. Then the powerful evocation of drowning—the sinking and rising and sinking, with the staccato of iambic monosyllables reinforcing the drama. Next, the hammer effect of the p’s in “pinned down by pain … past resolution’s power.” But the strongest reiteration is in the repeated “It well may be.” How subtly its first appearance leaves the outcome in doubt, whereas the second, however understatedly, insinuates love’s permanence. This, manifestly, is not just Millay having good sex; it is Millay in love.

Finally: a sonnet from Huntsman, What Quarry? of 1939, which, to be sure, is still eleven years before Edna’s pathetic demise:

I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex,
Go forth at nightfall crying like a cat,
Leaving the lofty tower I laboured at
For birds to foul and boys and girls to vex
With tittering chalk; and you, and the long necks
Of neighbours sitting where their mothers sat
Are well aware of shadowy this and that
In me, that’s neither noble nor complex.
Such as I am, however, I have brought
To what it is, this tower; it is my own;
Though it was reared To Beauty, it was wrought
From what I had to build with: honest bone
Is there, and anguish; pride; and burning thought;
And lust is there, and nights not spent alone.

This sonnet is as good an autobiographical summary and apologia as one could wish for. Yet it is also eminently lyrical. Thus the image of the moon as belonging not only to the night but also to capitalized, i.e., deified, Sex; the woman heading for her illicit sexual adventures crying like a cat in heat; the poetic oeuvre viewed as a “lofty tower.” But the tower is pelted by bird droppings—most likely unfavorable criticism; and covered with young people’s silly, amorous graffiti—presumably college kids trivializing the poems. This tower stands in sharp contrast to Edna’s nocturnal escapades, known not only to you, the momentary lover, but also to censorious, spying neighbors, gossiping away about “shadowy this and that.” A very apt phrase, suggesting both the clandestine trysts and the idleness of gossip about venial sins.

“Such as I am” has a nice, ironic coloring. The tower—or oeuvre, but oeuvre blended with the poet’s life, hence the upcoming biological trope—is very much her own, and though dedicated to a capitalized Beauty, is made of her mortal flesh and blood. Or, specifically, “honest bone,” i.e., stubborn strength, but also commingling self-confidence and anxiety (pride and anguish). And also keen intellect (burning thought). But then the palinode of the last line, which, as so often in Millay, surprises through its down-to-earth—almost throwaway—quality that sneaks up on the reader: “And lust is there,” perhaps less than admirable, but also “nights not spent alone,” a small victory over loneliness. Compare the previously cited ending, “I do not think I would.”

We come now to Millay’s disintegrating last phase, so finely evoked by Edmund Wilson in his 1948 journal (“A Visit to Edna Boissevain”) and The Shores of Light (“Epilogue, 1952”). McClatchy, evaluating the late work in his introduction, finds it “likely that the alcohol and drug addiction that plagued the last fifteen years of her life drained her powers of concentration,” with which one must agree. “Though,” he continues, “her posthumous collection, Mine the Harvest, contains poems as fleetingly spirited as before.” I don’t know what to make of “fleetingly spirited,” but if it means anything like good, I disagree. Of the poems from that collection that McClatchy includes, only one short lyric survives scrutiny:

The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.

The golden brooch my mother wore
She left behind for me to wear;
I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.

Oh, if instead she’d left to me
The thing she took into her grave!—
That courage like a rock, which she
Has no more need of, and I have.

Millay was always extremely close to her doughty mother, Cora, a nurse and hair-braider, whom she and her husband buried in a hillside above Steepletop (“a granite hill”). In a felicitous sentence of What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, Daniel Mark Epstein’s first-rate critical biography of Millay (reviewed by X. J. Kennedy in these pages in September 2001), we read, “Her desire to be mothered and her desire for her mother were indivisible.” Indeed in her other relationships something similar shows up: her almost superhumanly devoted and protective husband was something of both father and mother to her, and young Dillon was someone to care for the way one mothers an aging mother or very young lover.

In this late lyric, we note one reason for Millay’s fading importance (e.g., no representation in the 1976 New Oxford Book of American Verse): “quarried,” in line three, has to be read as a trisyllable to fit the meter and rhyme scheme. Such archaizing or poeticizing appears throughout Millay’s work, whose diction to the end is barely if at all different from, say, Tennyson’s. Furthermore, as McClatchy observes: “Eliot and Pound were expansionists, broadly addressing themselves to culture and ideas. Millay, by contrast, wrote of the private life, of domestic scenes. The modernist poets preferred the anonymous collage, the reverberant fragment. Millay preferred the single voice, hushed or hieratic, but always the embodiment of the lyric impulse.”

McClatchy has done yeoman’s work with both selection and editing, and Library of America was right to inaugurate its American Poets Project with Edna St. Vincent Millay. Fashions in literature, like those in couture, keep coming back, as she, if she hasn’t already, surely will.