the opposite sex. The emphasis on Ulysses’
absence and failure to return to relieve his wife
and people hints at a deep disillusionment with
human history that had overtaken Edna Millay,
as it did many of her post–World War I gener-
ation. In 1928, and again in an expanded version
in 1934 inWine from These Grapes,shepublished
a sonnet sequence called ‘‘Epitaph for the Race of
Man’’ predicting the end of the human race, com-
paring it to the lumbering dinosaurs that became
extinct.
Gilbert links that pessimism about the hope-
less state of humanity with ‘‘An Ancient Ges-
ture.’’ Penelope’s story suggests that woman is
trapped in an unjust world made by man, yet
she is loyal and dutiful, upholding and defending
that world with every ounce of her strength.
Though brilliant and clever like Ulysses, so full
of promise, the human race in ‘‘Epitaph for the
Race of Man’’ seems weak and unable to tame
itself, to outwit its own destruction. The modern
speaker’s grief in ‘‘An Ancient Gesture,’’ like
Penelope’s ancient grief, suggests that not much
has changed in thousands of years. The speaker’s
frustration feels personal but is part of the inher-
ited condition of her world. Ulysses was a famous
warrior, but he failed as a king and husband, the
poem implies, as men have failed everywhere to
create a peaceably livable world.WHAT
DO I READ
NEXT? A Life of One’s Own: Three Gifted Women and
the Men They Married(1973), by Joan Dash,
is a study of famous independent women
and the marriages that supported them.
Millay’s marriage stood out as unusual for
the early twentieth century, as Millay was
both the breadwinner and the public figure,
while her husband was the caretaker. The
other two women featured are Margaret
Sanger, who championed birth control, and
Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who shared with
two others the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics.
T. S. Eliot’sThe Waste Land, and Other
Poems(1940) helps to put Millay’s work in
perspective, showing the contrast of the
more intellectual and heavily ironic stream
of twentieth-century poetry. Eliot, who won
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, was
considered the model for modernist poets by
the New Critics, who rejected Millay’s per-
sonal lyrics.
A Private Madness: The Genius of Elinor
Wylie, by Evelyn Helmick Hively (2003), is
a study of Millay’s poet friend Wylie (1885–
1928), who wrote four novels and four vol-
umes of poetry in the tempestuous twenties.Wylie wrote a similar kind of lyric poetry
that tapped the same traditional sources of
Renaissance and romantic sonnets that Millay
used. Millay defended Wylie to the public
over her controversial life. This study gives a
feel for the life Millay and Wylie shared in the
1920s as they strove to be recognized female
poets.
Mary McCarthy’s famous novelThe Group
(1963) describes a group of Vassar girls and
their lives between the two world wars. One
of the characters, Lakey, is widely believed
to be modeled on Millay. In any case, the
Vassar culture that Millay came out of a
generation earlier than McCarthy did is por-
trayed in candid detail.
Aria da Capois Millay’s one-act play written
for the Provincetown Players in Greenwich
Village; she directed and acted in the play in
1919, and it was first published in 1920. It is a
morality play against war and human aggres-
sion in the form of a harlequinade. Still pop-
ular and anthologized, it shows one of
Millay’s many gifts, for she was poet, play-
wright, and performer.An Ancient Gesture