Poetry for Students, Volume 31

who were experimenting with intellectual poetry in free verse; they found Millay to be a sentimental woman writer lacking depth. ...

1920 to 1922, she joined the American expatriates in Paris and Europe, publishing fiction forVanity Fairas well as her poems and ...

Line 3 tells us that Penelope cried frequently and then emphasizes the difficulty or impossibility of weaving all day, with the ...

do differently than to cry. The tears come, and it is the only gesture that makes sense in such a moment. The whole first stanza ...

THEMES Grief and Loss Although the poem does not reveal exactly what the speaker is going through, the extended com- parison wit ...

on his long journey home from the war. In Hom- er’s version, he was tested, attacked, and impris- oned and eventually lost all h ...

deceptions, in which they cannot reveal their true feelings or the reasons for their grief. They weep when no one is looking, fo ...

Penelope is not only virtuous and loyal but also clever in her strategy to hold off the suitors. Millay retells the story, howev ...

In ‘‘An Ancient Gesture,’’ the speaker comes in directly only in the first line of each stanza. The rest of the poem develops th ...

hedonistic lifestyle in her poems, especially in the famous collectionA Few Figs from Thistles(1920). Her call to burn the candl ...

and made her into an international citizen, which proved important to her poetry during the coming war years. 1920s–1940s U.S. P ...

Czechoslovakia. Millay knew that this was infe- rior poetry and that she had compromised her artistic integrity but felt that th ...

roles. She is also praised by critics such as Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, in her essay in the same volume, as an important feminist p ...

the opposite sex. The emphasis on Ulysses’ absence and failure to return to relieve his wife and people hints at a deep disillus ...

This reading, of larger social and spiritual implications forming an important background of Millay’s personal lyric, became obv ...

verse. Gilbert Allen writes with hindsight inCrit- ical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay(1993) that Millay’s poetry rests on pr ...

compare the two books is to see how all that is good in her work, all that is of permanent interest, is circumscribed by the per ...

Thistles], for example, in ‘‘Thursday,’’ ‘‘The Pen- itent,’’ ‘‘To the Not Impossible He’’ and other witty ironies, and in more s ...

Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay, edited by William B. Thesing, G. K. Hall, 1993, p. 95; originally published inNation ...

The Black Snake Although Mary Oliver has earned a reputation as a nature poet, her work extends beyond simple descriptions of na ...