roles. She is also praised by critics such as Jo Ellen
Green Kaiser, in her essay in the same volume, as
an important feminist poet who courageously
worked against the male modernist tide. Millay’s
place in the twentieth-century canon has been
restored, and she is now anthologized and
appreciated.
CRITICISMSusan Andersen
Andersen holds a Ph.D. in literature and teaches
literature and writing. In the following essay on
‘‘An Ancient Gesture,’’ she explores the critical
reaction to Millay’s work and examines Millay’s
use of Penelope as a symbol for a feminist tradi-
tion in poetry and culture.
Edna St. Vincent Millay was unofficially the
‘‘Poet Laureate of the Nineteen Twenties,’’ as
declared by Vasudha Radhu inThe Golden Vessel
of Great Song: Edna Millay’s Lyrical Poetry,as
well as a respected feminist voice for liberated
woman. By the time of her death in 1950, how-
ever, Millay had been swept aside as largely insig-
nificant to the trends of American poetry. ‘‘An
Ancient Gesture’’ was one of Millay’s posthu-
mously published poems. While it deviates some-
what from the traditional lyric form that the
modernist poets scorned her for using, it retains
the personal force present in her lyric voice and
poetry since the beginning of her career. The
figure of Penelope the weaver in ‘‘An Ancient
Gesture’’ can be seen as a symbol not only for
woman’s trials in general but also for the trials of
the woman artist in a man’s world.
Jane Stanbrough’s reading of ‘‘An Ancient
Gesture’’ inCritical Essays on Edna St. Vincent
Millaystresses the poem as a symbol of ‘‘women
whose dreams are denied, whose bodies are
assaulted, whose minds and spirits are extin-
guished.’’ Debra Fried, in a rebuttal to Stanbrough
published in the same volume, asserts that Millay
demonstrates not the vulnerability of women but
their strength. As an artist, Millay used the strict
sonnet form to show not confinement but mastery;
she aimed to wrestle her materials into submission,
as with her sonnet ‘‘I will put Chaos into fourteen
lines.’’
‘‘An Ancient Gesture’’ uses images of both
strength (physical endurance) and frustration
(Penelope doing and undoing her work in secret)
to make the reader feel the speaker’s trying
position. The poem yields somewhat contradictory
readings, both of a woman’s life and of the woman
as artist. Does Penelope’s cry of grief symbolize
heroic endurance or victimization? Penelope, the
constant weaver, can be seen as a hero, a symbol of
woman’s creativity as well as a source of culture
and tradition.
Nina Kossman includes ‘‘An Ancient Gesture’’
in the Oxford anthologyGods and Mortals: Mod-
ern Poems on Classical Myths. In her introduction
to the volume, Kossman points out that the ‘‘ven-
erable tradition of donning a Greek mask is often
used by poets in order to speak of things they
would have found difficult to approach.’’ Pene-
lope’s grief is archetypal, a primal or model grief,
and as such magnifies and justifies the speaker’s
position. The speaker appears to be an ordinary
woman in the first line, but her grief feels extra-
ordinary, especially in that she links it to something
deep and ancient, to Penelope’s grief. Kossman
explains that ‘‘myths echo the structure of our
unconscious.’’ The speaker thinks of Penelope
spontaneously in a moment of emotion. She does
not throw out an intellectual reference to the Greek
myth but, rather, has a heartfelt and personal con-
nection to Penelope, as though the storied woman
were someone she knew intimately.
Kossman points out that modern poets who
use myths frequently give a new twist to the old
story. In theOdyssey, the emphasis is on the
heroism of Ulysses. In her essay inCritical Essays
on Edna St. Vincent Millay,SandraM.Gilbert
remarks that in ‘‘An Ancient Gesture’’ the most
significant change in the myth is that the poem
‘‘questions the epic posturings of one of history’s
primordial heroes.’’ Ulysses loses his solid heroic
stature as a savior of civilization in the poem,
while Penelope captures the stage as a mother of
culture. Ulysses copies her gesture. As Gilbert
shows, the criticism implied of the hero Ulysses
in this poem is deeper than a woman’s criticism ofULYSSES LOSES HIS SOLID HEROIC STATURE
AS A SAVIOR OF CIVILIZATION IN THE POEM,
WHILE PENELOPE CAPTURES THE STAGE AS A
MOTHER OF CULTURE.’’An Ancient Gesture