verse. Gilbert Allen writes with hindsight inCrit-
ical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay(1993) that
Millay’s poetry rests on principles that are differ-
ent from those of high modernism, and he asserts
that this does not make it inferior.
Suzanne Clark, in her essay ‘‘Uncanny Millay,’’
included inMillay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal,
sees the poet’s personal lyric, with its often exagger-
ated emotion, as a series of theatrical masks for her
bardic voice. Recordings of Millay’s powerful read-
ings do suggest the bardictradition of song. Bards
were ancient singers and seers in oral traditions who
sang to prophesy and to preserve culture. Modern
poets like Yeats and Dylan Thomas copied this
style. Millay herself nodoubt thought of Sappho
as the originator of this type of song; she frequently
uses the ancient figure in poems (‘‘Sappho Crosses
the Dark River into Hades’’) and was often com-
pared to Sappho by the public. Sappho is indeed
credited with inventing the personal lyric in the
seventh centuryBCE.She,too,wascopiedand
imitated by men until her poems went out of fashion
and her reputation was debased.
The artist’s secret strain, revealed in the
poem, is at odds with Millay’s lyric style. Like
the rhythm of Penelope’s loom, Millay’s poetry is
singing, ecstatic, focused on the beauty or emo-
tion of a moment, as in ‘‘God’s World’’ or ‘‘After-
noon on a Hill.’’‘‘An Ancient Gesture’’ continues
this lyric ease in capturing a telling moment: the
wiping away of tears of grief, a universal act
performed even thousands of years ago by the
storied Greeks. At the same time, the poem splits
that primal gesture of wiping tears into male and
female traditions. The female act is spontaneous,
and the speaker does not call it a gesture, a word
that can imply habitual response, a learned act of
communication. Ulysses, to the contrary, has
appropriated the response as a gesture for his
own purposes—and that is also an ancient act.
Millay was celebrated in her own time for
creating a new tradition of emancipation in
women’s poetry (as noted by Milford). Her sister
and mother also published poetry. ‘‘The Harp-
Weaver’’ is a poem about the sacrifices her
mother made so that Millay could become a
poet; as she said in an interview, ‘‘Mother gave
me poetry’’ (quoted in Milford). In her art, Millay
uses female archetypes—Sappho, the little girl
mystic, the femme fatale, the broken-hearted
woman—to portray the many-sided feminine
self. Gilbert claims in ‘‘Female Female Imperso-
nator: Millay and the Theatre of Personality,’’
included inCritical Essays on Edna St. Vincent
Millay, that Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne
Rich, and Denise Levertov all followed Millay’s
legacy of feminine self-dramatization. By claiming
Penelope as a moral and artistic mother in this poem,
originator of the ancient gesture, Millay both creates
and continues feminist, rather than feminine, tradi-
tions with her art.
Source:Susan Andersen, Critical Essay on ‘‘An Ancient
Gesture,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning,
2010.Delmore Schwartz
In the following essay, Schwartz, a literary figure
typically associated with ‘‘the New York intellec-
tuals’’ of the 1940s, discusses how Millay’s work
was a product of her time. In Schwartz’s view, this
fact perhaps accounts for both her popular success
and her ‘‘essential failure.’’
Miss Millay belongs to the ages. Posterity,
which is an anachronism, may prove this strong
impression an illusion. But we shall now know
about that. Meanwhile Miss Millay has written a
good many poems... which make her a great
poet to most readers of poetry. These readers
consider Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, Blake, and Shakespeare great poets
also; and if they read Poe, Longfellow, and Miss
Millay, rather than Blake and Shakespeare, what
else can be expected? How else can these readers
sustain their view of what great poetry is?...
Miss Millay belongs to an age as well as to
the ages. She is dated in a good sense. Like Scott
Fitzgerald, H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, [and]
prohibition,... she belongs to a particular period.
No one interested in that period will fail to be
interested in Miss Millay’s poems.... Her lyrics
were used by the period, and she was made
famous by their usefulness; but now they are
inseparable from the period, and they will always
illuminate the liberated Vassar girl, the jazz age,
bohemianism, and the halcyon days of Greenwich
Village. Who can forget the famous quatrain in
which a lady’s candle burns at both ends, and will
not last the night, but gives a lovely light? How
could this point of view have been stated with
greater economy of means or more memorably?
Yet not all that is memorable is admirable....
Miss Millay has perhaps been defeated by her
very success.Fatal Interview... is probably her
best book, but there is nothing in it which repre-
sents an advance in perception or insight over her
first book, which was published in 1917. ToAn Ancient Gesture