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 period in which she
became a famous poetess.
Consider, as an example, the view of love
which recurs without exception in these lyrics
and in many of Miss Millay’s sonnets; in one of
her best-known sonnets, ‘‘What lips may lips have
touched and how and why / I have forgotten,’’
Miss Millay compares the female protagonist of
the poem to a tree and ‘‘the unremembered lads’’
who were her lovers to birds. Is this not the eter-
nal feminine of the day when woman’s suffrage
was an issue and not yet an amendment? If one
has a weakness for visualizing images, then the
dominant image of the poem certainly presents
the female and the lads in unfair proportions.
Elsewhere some lovers are assured that a love
affair is not any the less true love because it has
been rapidly succeeded by several more love
affairs, an assurance which might come gracefully
from Catherine the Great, let us say, but which is
not really the kind of attitude that makes great
poetry. Is it not, indeed, just as shallow as its
opposite, the squeezable mindless doll whom
Hemingway celebrates? Yet just such attitudes
explain Miss Millay’s popular fame at the same
time as they exhibit her essential failure. The late
John Wheelwright remarked that Miss Millay
had sold free love to the women’s clubs. Yes,
this has been at once her success and her failure;
and one should add that another attribute of this
kind of famous authoress is that of inspiring
epigrams.
When we look closely at Miss Millay’s poetic
equipment—her images, diction, habits of style,
and versification—we find the same twins of suc-
cess and failure. Her diction especially is poetic in
the wrong sense: the candles, arrows, towers,
scullions, thou’s, lads, girls, prithees, shepherds,
and the often-capitalized Beauty and Death are
words which come, not from a fresh perception
of experience, but from the reading of many lyric
poems.... If there is an alternative, it is perhaps
to be seen flickering in the poems in which Miss
Millay draws upon what she has actually looked
at on the New England coast or in the Maine
woods....
But if Miss Millay had cultivated and
searched out the actuality of this experience
instead of using it as a stage set, she would not
be the first text of all the girls who are going to
write poetry; she would not have depended upon
attitudes which are as characteristic of literate
youth as the sophomore year; after her second
volume she would have abandoned the obvious
and banal poses she has struck in the face of love
and death. She would not be the most famous
poetess of our time, and she might have com-
posed a body of poetry characterized by the non-
esuch originality—however often warped, thin,
fragmentary, exotic, or ingrown—of Marianne
Moore, Leonie Adams, Louise Bogan, and Janet
Lewis.
Source:Delmore Schwartz, ‘‘The Poetry of Millay,’’ in
Nation, Vol. 157, No. 25, December 18, 1943, pp. 735–36.Harriet Monroe
In the following excerpt, Monroe contends that
Millay is ‘‘the greatest woman poet since Sappho.’’
Long ago...I used to think how fine it
would be to be the greatest woman poet since
Sappho....
I am reminded by that old dream to wonder
whether we may not raise a point worthy of
discussion in claiming that a certain living lady
may perhaps be the greatest woman poet since
Sappho....
[The] woman-poets seem to have written
almost exclusively in the English language. Emily
Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina
Rossetti, Emily Dickinson—these four names
bring us to 1900....
Emily Bronte—austere, heroic, solitary—is
of course the greatest woman in literature. Not
even Sappho’sHymn to Aphrodite... can surpass
Wuthering Heightsfor sheer depth and power of
beauty, or match it for the compassing of human
experience in a single masterpiece. ButWuthering
Heights, though poetic in motive and essence,
classes as a novel rather than a poem.... As a
poet, she has not the scope, the variety, of Edna
St. Vincent Millay, whose claim to pre-eminence
we are considering....
‘‘Renascence’’ remains the poem of largest
sweep which Miss Millay has achieved as yet—
the most comprehensive expression of her philos-
ophy, so to speak, her sense of miracle in life and
death—yet she has been lavish with details of
experience, of emotion, and her agile and pene-
trating mind has leapt through spaces of thought
rarely traversed by women, or by men either for
that matter.
For in the lightest of her briefest lyrics there is
always more than appears. In [A Few Figs fromAn Ancient Gesture