A History of American Literature

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Making It New: 1900–1945 389

iconoclasm, a positive desire to offend bourgeois sensibilities and mock bourgeois
morality, with an astute understanding of traditional forms and meters. For a while,
during the 1920s, she became the lyric voice for the lost generation. In poems that
sang gaily of going “back and forth all night on the ferry” or cavalierly acknowledged
the death of a love affair (“Unremembered as old rain / Dries the sheer libation”),
she attacked conventional notions of virtue – and, in particular, feminine virtue –
with impudence, irreverence, and wit. “What lips my lips have kissed, and where,
and why, / I have forgotten,” she announced, and elsewhere, in what is perhaps her
most famous poem, “First Fig,” she declared that while she might be accused of
burning her candle “at both ends,” it was precisely because of that, the economy of
excess, that it gave “a lovely light.”
Several of her poems, such as “Thursday” (1923), recall the bravura, the
insouciance, and the sly grace of the Cavalier poets; while her rejection of utilitarian
structures, standard measurements of use and value, in a poem like “Second Fig”
(1920), echoes that first American bohemian, Poe. As the 1920s faded, the work
Millay produced showed her branching out toward political commitment (“Justice
Denied in Massachusetts” (1928)) and, on the other hand, classical themes (“Oh,
Sleep Forever in the Latmian Cave” (1931)). But she began losing her audience, like
that other, greater poet of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald. It is, in any case, for the earlier
work that she will be remembered – and, more especially, for her ability to capture
both the rebelliousness and the romanticism of what Fitzgerald called “the greatest,
gaudiest spree in history.”
Three other poets whose work demonstrates a vivid contrast between the intensely
personal, subjective nature of their subjects and the extraordinarily polished,
objective character of the poetic forms they use are Josephine Miles (1911–1985),
Louise Bogan (1897–1970), and Léonie Adams (1899–1988). The forms used by
these three, however, are less obviously lyrical and romantic than the ones favored
by Wylie and Millay: they belonged to what Yvor Winters termed the “reactionary
generation” – poets, like Winters himself, who chose a strict impersonality of voice
as well as tight disciplines of structure and meter. Of these, Josephine Miles is
probably the least impressive. A teacher of English interested in the systematic use of
literary language, she tends towards highly wrought intellectualism, a poetry that at
its best is strenuous, witty, and abstruse. This is a poetry that is as tense, nervously
mobile and as unnerving as anything written by Allen Tate.
Louise Bogan is also a supreme technician, concerned with what she called “the
strong things of life.” In her case, though, clarity of image, exactitude of phrase and
rhythm, and a measured, lucid diction make for poems that derive their emotional
power from the poet’s positive refusal to invite an easy, emotional response.
“Portrait” (1923), for instance, describes a woman who has “no need to fear the fall /
of harvest,” and no need either to “hold to pain’s effrontery / Her body’s bulwark.”
The reader is not told why, exactly. All the poet offers us (and it is a great deal) is lines
that capture the larger paradoxes of life – its ebb and flow, losses and gains, passion
and its ambiguous rewards. Elsewhere, Bogan uses other, similarly effective
distancing techniques. In “The Dream” (1954), for instance, the nightmare of a

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