76 THENEWYORKER,M AY16, 2022
young male poet-roués—and made it her
own. Her poems from this era are in praise
of the ephemeral: the f leeting attach-
ment, the doomed burst of romantic feel-
ing. “Thursday,” from the same batch of
poems, is charmingly insouciant:
And if I loved you Wednesday,
Well, what is that to you?
I do not love you Thursday—
So much is true.Shameless faithlessness, ecstatic pas-
sion, skepticism of enduring love: these
became Millay’s great themes. In her po-
etry from the early nineteen-twenties—
and, it seems, in her personal life—she
explored love’s paradoxes, the way incon-
stancy can inf lame ardor. The poems
spoke to her female contemporaries,
women who were sexually curious, even
active, and sick of pretension. Critics
praised her in newspapers and maga-
zines; Monroe, in Poetry, admired “how
neatly she upsets the carefully built walls
of convention.” Thomas Hardy counted
her poetry as one of America’s two great
attractions, the other being the skyscraper.
Millay’s genius lay in her ability to
infuse old poetic forms with a savvy mod-
ern voice. Only she would end a sonnet
about the quest for true love by calling
it “idle, biologically speaking”—that
technical, multisyllabic “biologically”
beautifully undercuts any sentimental-
ity. “Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree,”
a sequence from 1922, is a sendup of fe-
male martyrdom and the institution of
marriage. “There was rapture, of a de-
cent kind,/In making mean and ugly
objects fair,” Millay writes, of a woman
who spends her days cleaning the stove
and polishing candlesticks. Decent rap-
ture can’t help but conjure the indecent
variety; Millay knew both well.
Even decades after Millay’s death,
“Ungrafted Tree” was held in high es-
teem: the scholar Sandra M. Gilbert
called it Millay’s “finest sonnet-sequence.”
More recently, though, critics have
tended to trip all over themselves to as-
sure readers that they don’t consider
Millay significant, or even a particularly
good poet. There are several reasons for
this overcorrection: an allergy to popu-
lar literature, reflexive misogyny, and,
perhaps most important, the enduring
influence of literary modernism. Mod-
ernist poetry was allusive, dense, and
difficult, or it was short, cryptic, Imag-
ist. Millay, meanwhile, worked in famil-
iar lyric forms. Certain of her poems
could take on a singsong quality, like a
child’s nursery rhyme. They were more
delightful than intimidating.
But other poems demonstrated Mil-
lay’s sophistication. She was not just a
master of the sonnet but a student of it.
Late in life, she started an essay about
the form, naming Shakespeare as an in-
fluence, and much of her work evinces
a more mature understanding of love.
Her sonnets for Ficke, collected in “Sec-
ond April,” are some of her strongest.
In “And you as well must die, beloved
dust,” Millay borrows the technique of
the blazon, a staple of love poetry by
men, to praise her lover’s “flawless, vital
hand, this perfect head,/This body of
flame and steel.” In these poems and
others, Millay, like Shakespeare, plays
with gender, assuming an androgynous
voice and extolling male beauty with-
out identifying it as such.
Millay wrote her poems for Ficke,
who was eight years older, in her twen-
ties. As she imagined their future, it was
his beauty that would be “altered, es-
tranged,” his body that would turn to
dust. “Have you thought,” she asks in
one sonnet, “How in the years to come
unscrupulous Time,/More cruel than
death, will tear you from my kiss,/And
make you old, and leave me in my prime?”
A novice poet when they met, she un-
derstandably thought herself “a child”and him a “hero grown.” She had many
years and many poems ahead of her. But
Time would come for the child, too.D
uring the nineteen-tens and twen-
ties, Millay achieved the kind of
fame that was unusual for a poet then
and unthinkable now. Before the age
of the movie star, she became Ameri-
ca’s first starlet. Her books of poems
sold out their print runs. She wrote fe-
verishly, working on short stories, plays,
a libretto, a novel. She was photographedand interviewed; she was invited to lec-
ture; she won the Pulitzer Prize and
became rich. When she published the
sonnet sequence “Fatal Interview” (1931),
which was inspired by an affair with
the much younger poet George Dillon,
it sold fifty thousand copies, Great De-
pression be damned.
But fame is rarely an unmixed bless-
ing for a woman, particularly when it
arrives early in life. Like Judy Garland
or Britney Spears, Millay had to grow
up in public. She was always conscious
of her appearance: her diaries show her
worrying about being seen without a
new dress. At events, the press made
sure to comment on her clothing and
her figure. “The distinguished young
poet...resembles more the shy little
undergraduate,” one reporter wrote, after
attending a reading. (Millay was almost
thirty-two at the time.) When she mar-
ried the Dutch aristocrat and merchant
Eugen Jan Boissevain, in a small cere-
mony in 1923, newspapers around the
country covered the event; in New York,
three put it on the front page. Millay
was by then so sick with intestinal prob-
lems that she went straight from her
wedding to the hospital, where she un-
derwent surgery. The papers covered
this, too: “Honeymooning Alone in
Hospital,” “Poetess Bride to Go
Under the Knife.”
Aging, then, presented Millay with
a challenge: How could she write about
wild passion, or tortured love affairs,
when she was living a middle-aged wom-
an’s low-key life? Her marriage to Bois-
sevain was open, as were the marriages
of many of their friends, but, from her
diaries, it appears that Millay loved
spending time with him at a farm they
owned near Austerlitz, New York. “Beau-
tiful sunny day,” one entry from June,
1927, begins, shortly after they purchased
the property. “This morning at eight
under the willows in the pasture Dolly
gave birth to a beautiful calf.” “Nice cozy
rainy day,” another from the same sum-
mer opens. “Ugin [Boissevain] & I sat
by the open fire & Ugin read me from
Upton Sinclair’s Oil!” The pleasure
lasted: nearly seven years later, she de-
scribed “the crab-apple tree by the front
door...in full blossom,” which seemed
“the prettiest thing in the world.”
Millay was never able to translate her
contentment into compelling poetry.