This reading, of larger social and spiritual
implications forming an important background
of Millay’s personal lyric, became obvious only to
later critics of her work, especially feminist critics.
Yet there have always been sensitive readers who
have tried to exonerate her from the constant
attacks she sustained at the hands of the New
Critics for writing what they called personal and
sentimental poetry. For instance, James Gray,
writing inEdna St. Vincent Millay(1967), affir-
matively states that ‘‘the theme of all her poetry is
the search for the integrity of the individual
spirit.’’
The speaker of ‘‘An Ancient Gesture’’ pre-
sents Penelope’s struggles as different from Ulys-
ses’ but no less courageous and spiritually
demanding. Gray argues that Millay had both
male and female mental characteristics, suggesting
that she was therefore fit to describe ‘‘the psycho-
logical distance between man and woman,’’ which
he feels is her ‘‘original contribution to the litera-
ture of the love duel.’’ The usual emphasis in the
GreekmythisonPenelopeandUlyssesasthe
ideal married couple, in tune with and ever
devoted to each other. ‘‘An Ancient Gesture’’
points out the great gulf between Penelope’s
world and Ulysses’. She gives everything she has
with sincerity, while he acts his part, manipulating
his way to fame. This indeed was the reputation of
Ulysses, the clever trickster, and in theOdysseythe
goddess Athena rewards him for his wit. Millay
does not think clever wit is enough to make a just
world. Her poems on the Sacco-Vanzetti case
(‘‘Justice Denied in Massachusetts’’) and on Nazi
atrocities (‘‘Murder of Lidice’’) and her sonnet
sequence ‘‘The Epitaph for the Race of Man’’
lament that humans have failed to live up to
their potential, as Norman Brittin notes in his
bookEdna St. Vincent Millay. In the century she
knew, with two world wars and a Great Depres-
sion, the manipulators seemed to be at the helm.
Gray points out that Millay often uses a
woman speaker who is performing a common
task, such as we imagine the speaker of ‘‘An
Ancient Gesture’’ to be doing. Since she wipes
her tears with an apron, the reader assumes she
is probably in the kitchen, cooking or cleaning.
This homely or personal activity, says Gray,
‘‘becomes symbolic of the urgent need to keep
the forces of life alive in threatening circumstan-
ces.’’ Penelope’s loom is the perfect image for both
woman’s life and woman’s art. Penelope appears
to be weaving a shroud for her father-in-law like a
dutiful wife. Her loom, however, symbolizes an
artistic and political act. Her practice of weaving
and unweaving to hold off the suitors from herself
and the throne of Ithaca demonstrates her crea-
tivity on many levels. Her exhaustion and grief at
the circumstances demanding this creative jug-
gling act cause her to weep, and yet, to wipe
away the tears and continue with fortitude.
Millay’s biographer Nancy Milford reports
an interview between Elizabeth Breuer and
Millay in 1931 in which the latter said, ‘‘I work
all the time.... And I think of my work all the
time.’’ Like Penelope, she often stayed up all night
and exhausted herself. Millay further admitted, ‘‘I
am a very concentrated person as an artist....
The nervous intensity attendant on writing
poetry, on creative writing, exhausts me, and I
suffer constantly from a headache.’’ While she
often wrote of the differences between men and
women as people, Millay did not think a woman
poet should be treated differently from a male
poet: ‘‘What you produce, what you create must
stand on its own feet, regardless of your sex’’
(quoted in Milford). She did not like being char-
acterized as a woman artist in a separate category
by male critics, because this implied that she was
inferior. However, she ‘‘made a point of refusing
to explain or to defend her choices,’’ as Milford
states. Rather, she kept writing, working at her
poetic loom.
Millay was suspect to critics because of her
great popularity with the public, but she earned
the money that supported her family (including
her husband, mother, and sisters at times) with
her performances on stage and radio. At the same
time, she conversed with the leading artists of the
day, won the first Pulitzer Prize ever offered a
woman poet, and was aware of the high expect-
ations that people had for her work. She was
distressed by bad reviews. She also increasingly
felt the need to use her position to speak out on
behalf of social issues. Her nerves were sensitive;
she had breakdowns. Could not Penelope’s
exhausting art and persona juggling suggest Mill-
ay’s own struggle to uphold her poetic integrity
against the largely male and aggressive modernist
critics who explicitly linked her style with femi-
nine weakness? The New Critic Allen Tate, who
praised W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound as the norm
for true poetry, declares in a 1931New Republic
review that Millay’s poetry is outdated and vir-
tually dead. He finds her unworthy of the first
rank of poets for producing shallow and imitativeAn Ancient Gesture