Czechoslovakia. Millay knew that this was infe-
rior poetry and that she had compromised her
artistic integrity but felt that the pressure of the
times called for action. She had a nervous break-
down in 1944 after the critical censure for her
political involvement and was unable to continue
writing for two years.
Critical Overview.
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s career as a poet was
launched with a single prize-winning poem,
‘‘Renascence,’’ written when she was nineteen and
published in the anthologyThe Lyric Yearin 1912.
Poets like her contemporaries Louis Untermeyer
and Sara Teasdale welcomed her to the literary
scene as a girl genius, a mystic in the tradition of
the great romantic poets. In a 1923 review of her
work published inAmerican Poetry since 1900,
Untermeyer points out her early promise, speaking
of her ‘‘lyrical mastery’’ and ‘‘spiritual intensity,’’
calling her a ‘‘belated Elizabethan’’ but censuring
the bohemian flavor present in her 1920 collection
A Few Figs from Thistles. He is disappointed in its
flippancy and ‘‘facile cynicism’’ but happy at her
return to her lyrical mode inSecond April.
The early estimates of Millay’s work are
almost always favorable, though it is said that
she exaggerates emotion. Her lyric mastery is
often cited, although it is sometimes lamented
that she looks back toward earlier traditions in
poetry rather than forward. Maxwell Anderson,
in a review ofSecond AprilinMeasure: A Journal
of Poetry, states that she has ‘‘an almost flawless
sensitiveness to phrase’’ and that she finds the right
‘‘homely image’’ to fit her meaning. Harriet Mon-
roe, editor ofPoetry, remarks in a 1924 assess-
ment, a decade after Millay’s emergence and after
her Pulitzer Prize in 1923 forThe Harp-Weaver,
and Other Poems, that Millay is perhaps ‘‘the
greatest woman poet since Sappho.’’ The eminent
critic and Millay’s friend Edmund Wilson did
much to secure her reputation as a fine poet. He
praises her in a 1926New Republicreview for her
‘‘deeply moving rhythms,’’ her ‘‘music,’’ her ‘‘sin-
gular boldness, which she shares with the greatest
poets,’’ and her ‘‘literary proficiency.’’
In 1929 Millay was elected to the National
Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1931 she
received the Helen Haire Levinson Prize for son-
nets forFatal Interview. In the 1930s, however,
critics were not so appreciative. They had been
waiting for the girl genius to grow up, as they
put it. Louise Bogan, for instance, says in a 1935
review inPoetrythat Millay runs away from her
own artistic maturity inFatal Interviewbut embra-
ces it inWine from These Grapes. She praises Mill-
ay’s ‘‘power over meter and epithet’’ but warns her
against ‘‘mere lyrical prettiness.’’
The 1930s saw Millay rise in public popular-
ity, as she read to large audiences on tours and
over the radio, while at the same time beginning
her fall from critical grace. She was pronounced
out of date and imitative by the New Critics, who
promoted instead the rigorous thought and
experimentation of male poets like T. S. Eliot,
James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos
Williams. John Crowe Ransom argues inThe
World’s Body(1938) that Millay is not up to the
masculine intellectual effort of male poets. He
suggests that she is sentimental and feminine,
not to be taken seriously. In the 1940s, criticism
intensified with the publication of her political
poetry. In theKenyon Reviewin 1945, Herbert
Marshall McLuhan calls Millay ‘‘a purveyor of
cliche ́sentiment. She is an exhibitionist with no
discoverable sensibility of her own.’’ It was dur-
ing this period of perceived failure that Millay
had a nervous breakdown and was unable to
write. She died in 1950.
In a review in theNationof her posthumous
collectionMine the Harvest(1954), in which ‘‘An
Ancient Gesture’’ appears, John Ciardi finds
‘‘flashes of power’’ in the collection but laments
Millay’s lack of intellectual investment. Her
poems are too ‘‘self-dramatizing,’’ he states. Writ-
ing after the publication of Millay’sCollected
Poems in 1956, Paul Engle in theNew York
Postlauds her as ‘‘one of the great makers of
sonnets in this century’’; but still, as Sandra M.
Gilbert points out in her article ‘‘Female Female
Impersonator: Millay and the Theatre of Person-
ality,’’ inCritical Essays on Edna St. Vincent
Millay, the poet was largely left out of antholo-
gies and studies of twentieth-century poetry dur-
ing the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
Norman Brittin’s 1982 study of Millay’s
poetry,Edna St. Vincent Millay, signaled renewed
interest in her work; Brittin hails her as the finest
American lyrical poet of the twentieth century.
Critics of the 1990s began to view her contribu-
tion to American poetry in terms of feminism;
Suzanne Clark, in her essay inMillay at 100: A
Critical Reappraisal, finds Millay to be a genius at
‘‘masquerade,’’ using personae to critique socialAn Ancient Gesture